Inputs to the Sprint Retrospective
The sprint review ceremony is one input to the retrospective ceremony. During the sprint review the scrum team will work with the product owner and perhaps a few key stakeholders, to evaluate the success in delivering committed features. Evaluation of improvements identified in a prior retrospective should also be reviewed against the current sprint to determine if there was value in making the changes.
Prioritisation of Features
Both complexity of features and stack ranking of the use of features will impact the prioritisation that testers use for feature testing and delivery. If significant numbers of features cannot be delivered during the sprint review, the testers within the scrum team should evaluate how the prioritisation was managed. If feature testing ended up being more complex than originally anticipated, the testers may need to re-evaluate the user stories to determine if they were larger and had more components than anticipated. Complex features that are delivered later in a sprint than anticipated will impact the testers’ ability to complete validation. The risk is that the feature may not be approved for inclusion in the sprint review due to the testing being incomplete. The product owner and end users should not approve a feature for release that has not been adequately tested. This will show up in the review of features.
Testing Schedule
Testers frequently express concerns about the time allotted to complete testing cycles. Some scrum teams will decide to add a hardening sprint prior to a release. This is done so that functional testing is the only function of the actual sprint. Integration and regression testing may be moved to a hardening sprint as part of the sprint retrospective. There is significant debate within the Agile scrum community as to whether adding a hardening sprint is a better approach than evaluating the number and complexity of features that should be included within a sprint. Hardening sprints may be better aligned for testing in a scaled Agile environment where a Scrum of scrums is to be delivered within a release.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: