How should QA and Devs work together within an Scrum Agile sprint?

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On my team we have about 5 developers and 3 QA testers.

Our sprints are 10 day sprints but our work as developers is due on the 6th day so that the QA testers can have 3 days to test our completed work before our biweekly release.

I feel like the system is very inefficient and really limits the work we can do as developers since we only have 6 days of development followed by a few days of thumb twiddling since there aren't any more user stories groomed yet.

How does everyone else do it?

2 Answers

The developers' tasks should be granular enough to be completed by the developers in around 4 hours, if possible. This helps the developers complete around 2 tasks every day, and starting on day 1, the QAs will be able to start testing.

You can change the numbers according to your dynamics, but generally, granular tasks help async work and utilization.

Some of the things you might try:

  • Break stories down as small as possible
  • Use stubbs and mocks to make features available to start test preparation sooner
  • Use a test-first approach and write automated tests before the development work starts (both the QAs and the developers can write the automated tests)
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