How to manage project quality in agile development in practice

[Common quality problem phenomenon]
Software quality problems can largely be manifested from its development process
. The following phenomena I believe are typical in teams that lack effective project management.
When a feature is transferred for the first time, testers can find N low-level bugs. Then, after the developer "completes" the code, the tester performs regression testing and continues to find N bugs. Some of these bugs are bugs found in the first round of testing that have not been fixed correctly or completely, while a large part may be new bugs introduced by modifying previous bugs. So, this phenomenon keeps appearing in the third, fourth...regression tests.

The above phenomenon is a typical rework. Rework is not only a waste of time and labor, it is also a sign of quality problems.
The final delivery feature has several bugs found. Because the testers missed the test.

[Reason Analysis and Problem Solving Experience Sharing]
There are two main reasons for quality problems: personal factors and project management factors.

Human factors mainly include the knowledge, ability and experience of developers and testers, as well as work habits.
For example, although agile development has always emphasized test first. However, there are still many developers who are used to coding first and then testing. Worse yet, many developers are used to having all their code "written" and then centrally testing that code. The result of this is often that problems found in one place are often found elsewhere. So, he had to revise these questions repeatedly. This situation not only wastes their precious time. It also often leaves the problem uncorrected. In addition, many people without a computer professional background are lured by training institutions to be trained as testers with high salaries. For these testers, they often don't know how to test when the subject being tested is more technically distinct.

However, the human factor is often difficult to improve in the short term. Therefore, I will focus on the analysis from the perspective of project management.

Rework and leak testing are two major problems of software quality. From a project management perspective, rework is largely due to a lack of effective process control. That is, before a functional transfer tester conducts the test, it is not checked whether its quality meets certain requirements—minimum quality requirements. This point can actually be learned from the acceptance of materials in construction projects. For example, when building a building, if we do not use materials such as reinforced concrete to check whether the quality meets the requirements. Then, it is only later that their quality problems are discovered and they must be reworked. Regarding how to carry out process control to make the function to be tested meet the minimum quality requirements, you can learn from the specific practice of the Story demonstration. Interested readers can refer to the article on the IBM developerWorks website:

"Introduction of Story Demo in Agile Project Management Practice" http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cn/rational/r-cn-agilestorydemo

Of course , the quality problem is a systemic problem. The solution to this problem, then, must be systematic. Also, management is not about cooking according to a recipe. Managers must master a set of quality management methods, rather than "copying" the so-called good practices. The significance of learning good practice lies in mastering the methods and ideas behind it. The following article shares the idea of ​​quality management based on "empirical process control" in such a way, and shares some other specific practices for improving project quality based on the author's project management experience.

"Quality Management of Agile Project Management Practice" http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cn/rational/r-cn-agiletestingbestpractice