Why projects need to develop product with high quality?

Quality!! An integral part of any project within an organization. For successfully delivering a product, teams make sure that they develop a quality product within given time frame. Scrum, an agile methodology was introduced to be used in any small or big projects, when requirements keep changing.

When requirements keep changing during the course of product development, one big question arises – how to make something that will meet customer requirements within given time frame yet maintain its quality? It is a challenge for any team to build a valuable product that also maintains quality standards.

For such type of time-boxed projects, Scrum methodology was introduced; it was originally introduced for small software development projects. However, now it is being used in almost every project where time, and cost is fixed, and only scope varies during the course.  Teams develop the product in small iterations called ‘sprints’ and hold daily scrum, review, retrospective meetings that keeps project on track, identify the mistakes on time and get reviews from customer on time.

Scrum Process Cycle

How Scrum contributes in maintaining quality of a product

Having self-organizing, cross-functional teams with iterative and incremental approach for product development which provides feedback at early stages are major contributors for maintaining quality in scrum projects. Team members with designated roles such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, Scrum development team perform their respective tasks that help them to work individually towards defined goals and maintain quality. Product Owner takes responsibility for ensuring overall quality of the project by prioritizing tasks for the team and coordinating with stakeholders.

By maintaining key artifacts of scrum methodology such as product, sprint and release backlogs that keep track of pending and completed tasks, Product Owner can easily monitor the progress of the team. Daily scrum meetings (stand up meetings) organized by Scrum Master helps identifying roadblocks in the project, removing obstacles and tracking the team’s progress.

Visual tools such as whiteboard to monitor the team’s daily activities maintains clear visibility and allows flexibility in the process for easy monitoring and achieving milestones for every sprint. Representing the velocity of the project using burndown charts in scrum projects, maintains clear visibility depicting the work done and amount of work left. It also helps the team react to the issues at early stages when project deviates from its original path. Retrospective and review meetings at start and end of every sprint discovers the issues to be avoided in next sprints helps in continuous improvement of the project.

However, there are certain limitations in scrum that can hinder the process of quality management. If teams are not dedicated to perform testing, reviews or explore loopholes in the previous sprints during retrospection when they experience delay, quality of the product starts deteriorating over time.  Scrum methodology has proven to be good for small teams and not for bigger teams where adopting scrum framework is challenging.