project planning

Testers who analyze quality in every aspect of the team’s deliverables also have a responsibility to mitigate risks and practical issues that are bound to come up, and help the team succeed in their product as well as at being agile. Here are five such issues that testers can help the team alleviate or avoid.

Some teams only work with stories, but it can be difficult for a team new to agile to write stories that are easy to understand and provide value every time. An alternative is to add epics and tasks. Understanding the differences between each level and knowing what size story to use for each situation will improve the accuracy of your sprint planning.

A good key indicator for measuring how well your agile team is performing is the burndown chart. It’s a simple concept—as time passes, the amount of work to do decreases. Of course, there will be days when progress is not as expected or tasks end up larger than originally estimated. A burndown can help your team reset and keep stakeholders in the loop.

Effort estimation is a major challenge for all the stakeholders of a project. Most people generally underestimate situations that may block progress and consider only the best-case scenario for a project. Your choice of estimation method may not be helping, though. Which would be better for your team: estimating by man-hours or by user story points?