Transform Your Agile Test Process to Ship Fast with High Quality

Until 2009, the Atlassian JIRA team shipped a major release of its software every nine to twelve months. Everything was tested—every story and every bug fix—and everything still contained serious bugs. Story development moved quickly, but after the feature-complete date, several month-long hardening periods were required to make the software actually shippable. Integrating the release into Atlassian’s hosted platform took another three or four months. Now, the team ships JIRA from master directly to the hosted platform every two weeks, with features being written and tested within an iteration, and then bundled into a shippable release at the end. Penny Wyatt describes how to move the responsibility for quality back to developers, find bugs before development work even starts through early communication, use an active feedback loop to prevent classes of bugs, and reinforce the concept that “done means done”—ruthlessly backing out changes that aren’t fully completed by the end of the iteration. You, too, can learn how to ship fast with high quality.