How Agile Is Your Quality Assurance Process In A Spotify Model?

The Spotify Model for Scaling Agile is not even a model in itself.

It is an approach to driving productivity, innovation, accountability and quality in an agile development team. It is a people-driven approach.

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I am interested in the quality aspect of the approach.

The Quality Assurance strategy is driven horizontally across teams in a Spotify Model of Agile Development. The Quality Engineers act as facilitators of the quality of a product. They work in alignment with the team full of Product Owners, Developers and Architects.

Is the Quality Assurance Strategy Scalable?

Over time with cross-functional teams, quality assurance becomes part of the development, so much so that the responsibility is divided among the team while the accountability is lost.

The result is a skewed model that takes the control of quality away from Quality Assurance.

Automation is the real path to Quality Assurance.

This notion that Automation will provide better quality in long run is completely off the mark. The teams that follow this model generally scale to treat automation as the pinnacle of quality assurance in the long run.

The result is a bizarre half-baked quality process that provides an illusion of coverage.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFor a Quality Engineer, there are many good things that supplement the quality assurance process in this version of scaled agile. The cross-functional teams provide great insight into the lifecycle of a product.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAs a Quality Architect, the trick is to not let the Agile model trick you into losing control of the quality process in the name of flexibility. In Quality Terms, may be a very Agile Quality Assurance Process could be counter-productive.

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