Creating the Project Deliverables for Testers

Deliverables are items that result from processes that need to be given to the identified stakeholders within the project. Inputs to such processes include information, documents, and plans, while outputs include contracts, software, and results. It is important to know whether the project belongs to a large-scale enterprise that requires compliance to company standards, or a small-time project in a small company that will only need to focus on building the software.

Nevertheless, the progress of the project needs to be quantifiable. And Agile projects often use artefacts as its basic deliverables for development and progress tracking. This article will discuss what they are, and how testers can help in building them.

Product Vision Statement

Projects need an overarching goal to let the team know what they are working for, and that’s what the Product Vision is for. Ken Schwaber once said: “The minimum plan necessary to start a Scrum project consists of a vision and a Product Backlog. The vision describes why the project is being undertaken and what the desired end state is.” Thus, the team must invest time and resources in coming up with a great product vision.

Effort on product vision creation will depend on how innovative and complex the product will be. Even though the Product Owner is the one who is responsible for the product vision, it is best to involve the team in the creation process. If the product is simple or if the updates are minor, a workshop that lasts for a few hours or days will do.

For newer products or existing products with major changes, the team will need to carry out market research and prototyping activities to test out ideas. Testers can take from their experience in formulating the questions for market research. They can also help test or facilitate prototype testing and note any result from the tests to help in improving the prototype and idea. Involvement in the product vision creation process will also help testers understand the product better and therefore test it better once development commences.

Product Roadmap

The product roadmap is a high-level timeline that lays out the direction and planned steps to reach the project goals. It reconciles short term goals and long term goals with technological solutions by laying out the project initiatives, features, and enhancements that are planned for the product.

The product roadmap may change as the project progresses and as the product gets more refined. There could be major issues from a previous release that need to be plotted out along the product roadmap. Testers can help the product owner prioritise and schedule the fixes for these issues by identifying the severity and impact of these issues on the product.

Product Backlog

The product backlog is simply an ordered list of epics, feature backlog items or user stories and their descriptions. As the project progresses and accumulates more ideas and feedback from stakeholders, the product backlog will grow and backlog items will be further refine into smaller pieces of work.

The product backlog will also be updated to include bugs found in the project, and should be treated and addressed like other user stories in the backlog. The testers should ensure that these bugs should have the right amount of detail and expected results for developers to work on, the same way user stories list acceptance criteria. Testers can also help manage the product backlog and help set the priorities of these bugs by identifying the risks and impact involved.

When the team makes time for refining the product backlog, the testers can use this time to provide suggestions on the design and user experience as well as other business cases. Doing so would open conversations that could improve the product or prevent potential bugs.

Release Plan

Before the project deploys new product features and enhancements to their users, they are planned and plotted for in advance. A release plan would contain the goals of the release, the list of planned features or backlog items to be deployed, and the target release dates for the increments. 

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