Scrum, Security and Quality Assurance
In this article I will focus on Quality Assurance in Scrum Applied to Safety Critical Software.
Traditionally, safety-critical projects have been developed using the waterfall process. However, this makes it costly and challenging to incrementally introduce new features and to certify the modified product for use.
One of the many aspects of Scrum and similar approaches is that quality assurance is embedded in the process itself, and not explicitly documented. A Scrum team is supposed to be self-sustained, not having to rely on an external quality management or assurance function like a separate QA department.
First of all, a Scrum project enforces visibility and has frequent evaluation of status, progress and problems, which is used to re-plan and improve the project based on the most recent and updated knowledge.
Scrum also has dedicated activities for managing quality issues with both the product under development and the process itself; each short work- period, or sprint, concludes with a sprint review and potentially also a retrospective. The former evaluates the results so far and the latter evaluates the process itself to identify improvement needs and opportunities.
Scrum also strongly emphasises frequent interaction with the customer or the problem owner, and XP stresses continuous and frequent testing. This is necessary…
