How a Quality Engineer can extract better results from a Program Increment Planning

SAFe has helped teams under complex organizations, to think Test first. Following this approuch, the best ceremony to start think in test is Grooming session, as previous discribed in my last post. In this ceremony Engineer team has the first contact with new Stories, Acceptance critirea and Stories recived a size.

On the other hand, in some cases, you and your team weren’t able to think in all test scenarios possible for a story. However, you and your team ‘ll have another chance to create and refine test scenarios. This will happen under Program Increment Planning (PI).

It could be defined as a cerimony where team defines which sprint they’ll work on Features that delivery more value for their customers. This cerimony provides a clear understand for entire team, about business needs, roadmap, commited objectives and the program board.

In this context, follow some suggestions to help Quality Engineer in this ceremony to delivery more value for your customers:

• Why: Refine the understand about new features. Collect information about business needs. As already said for a famous writer: “How can you create an excellent test strategy for something you don’t understand”.
• When: Program Increment Planning.
• Who: This ceremony include entire team members, customer, business partners and guests. This is a collaborative session, where people contribute for a better delivery strategy.
• How:
• Revisit stories previous sized on Groomong Session, and check if test scenario make sence or need an update/adjust
• In case of questions, ask your PM, PO and Devs about the strategy to validate stories and acceptance criteria
• If need, request stories to work on Technical Debt (If you didn’t request before). For exemple, imagine you’ll need to validate a new story, and your Automation Testing Framework doesn’t have support to validate some new functionality. A Technical Debt story ‘ll allow you and your team work to update your Automation Testing Framework and eliminate this gap
• This ceremony has a session dedicated for risks. Report risks that can impact your deliverables
• Increase your network with customers. Probably you’ll need contact team during next sprints, to understand some process/flow, create data or wherever.

As you can see, under PI you and your team will revisit the stories previous groomed, to choice an sprint to work on them. Pay attention for the details of each feature and try to understand the business value behind the deliverable. If you understand better the business needs, you ‘ll be able to design automated scripts that follow am harmonious and consistent flow.