Are you struggling to make your QA match the pace and workflows of your development? Read on to get practical Scrum in Agile testing insights from the worldās leading companies and make your software delivery 4 times as fast.
Here is everything your team needs to know to make Scrum testing work in practice š
Scrum testing is the practice of verifying quality continuously throughout each sprint, so issues get caught before they reach the next cycle. It plays a vital role in Agile development. Instead of waiting until the end, testing happens throughout the development process, allowing you to catch issues early and make quick adjustments. Here’s what makes Scrum testing essential:
Scrum in software development shares the name with rugby but almost nothing else about how it works. While rugby squads organise in three rows that largely do the same thing, every person on the software team usually plays a unique part with varying tasks and responsibility.Ā
Most features of the Agile Scrum methodology in software testing originate from product lifecycle management. They also have influence beyond that, as specialists from other teams (such as financial auditors or our content team) adopt key principles as well.
ā Scrum is about incremental and frequent deliveries. Teams operate on fixed-length sprints (usually 2 weeks) that result in new feature releases. Some go for one-week sprints or even shorter
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Scrum brings flexibility. Waterfall software development outlines the process for start to finish with planning stretching multiple months. It is hard to react to potential delays or a change in market conditions when youāre weeks deep into fulfilling a requirement that may have become irrelevant.
By contrast, Scrum can adjust in a relatively short span. All tasks are added to the backlog, prioritised, and later added into a sprintās scope. Project Managers usually map out the current sprint + oneātwo sprints ahead. This means a non-priority feature request can be implemented in about 2 months, while something more urgent can be conjured in a couple of weeks. Going purely by Agile methodology, Scrum in testing would mean zero changes to the sprintās workload, but most teams constantly observe a balance between the methodology and business needs.
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Scrum promotes team work. All team members share their progress and stay vocal about potential blockers, while senior staff specifically takes time to help less experienced colleagues.
The ultimate goal of achieving a fast and feature-rich release requires well-timed collaboration. Although technically possible under Waterfall, the Agile Scrum testing process involves developers writing unit tests so that QA gets more polished and not conceptually flawed code to test.
Scrum ceremonies are not just ritualistic meetings eating up your calendar. Your daily standups work because they catch roadblocks before they snowball into sprint-killers.Ā
Sprint demos? They’re your reality check. When stakeholders actually see working features instead of reading status reports, miscommunications drop significantly. Developers often spot edge cases during these demos that testing missed.
Most teams treat retrospectives like complaint sessions, but it is wrong. The magic happens when you limit discussions to one concrete experiment per sprint. Start with this: pick the smallest process pain point your team mentioned last week and test a 2-week fix.
Track this simple metric: how many retrospective action items actually get implemented? If it’s under 60%, you’re probably trying to change too much at once. Your ceremonies should feel purposeful, not performative.
Similarly, the team roles are pretty synergetic as well. Product Owner is free to turn their vision into user stories. Project Manager provides a grounded version of that vision as they split the user story into tasks. Some teams even hire for the role of Scrum Master ā in Agile testing or beyond, their advice keeps everyone to Scrum principles.
As Scrum methodology emphasises speed, flexibility, and collaboration, you need to have the right quality management system to support these goals. Thatās where aqua cloud, an AI-powered test management system (TMS), steps in. aqua helps you align your QA goals with Scrum principles and enhances them, ensuring your team delivers quality every sprint. If you’re dealing with fast-paced sprints and handling various types of testing tasks, aqua cloud makes managing QA in Scrum more efficient and seamless. With 20 years of experience, aqua aims at its ultimate goal: taking away the pain of testing.
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Scrum testing supports the entire Agile delivery process, not just bug detection. Hereās what youāre aiming to achieve:
Scrum testing fits Agile projects because it is built around iteration, fast feedback, and shared team ownership. Here’s what youāll notice:
The Agile Testing Pyramid gives your team a practical structure for deciding how much to automate and at which level. It’s become the go-to structure for smart test automation. Think of it as three layers: tons of Unit Tests at the bottom, a solid middle of Integration/Service Tests, and just a few End-to-End UI Tests at the top. Automate roughly 70% at the unit level, 20% at integration, and only 10% as full E2E tests. This ratio catches bugs early when they’re cheap to fix, keeps your feedback loops snappy, and prevents those nightmare scenarios where flaky UI tests tank your entire pipeline. Teams using this approach report nearly doubled sprint velocity compared to those running heavy UI test suites. Start by auditing your current test split. If you’ve got more UI tests than unit tests, you’re looking at the pyramid upside down.
Scrum testing maps directly onto the Agile sprint cycle, with quality checks built into each phase. Hereās how youāll go about it:
Scrum agile QA comes with real constraints, and knowing them ahead of time helps your team prepare practical responses. Hereās what you might face:
With this approach, youāll be able to handle Scrum testing more effectively, keeping your team on track and your software top-notch.
Tracking the right metrics tells your team whether Scrum testing is actually working, not just running. Without measurement, sprint retrospectives become guesswork.
These are the metrics worth tracking in your Scrum agile QA process:
Pick two or three of these to start. Tracking too many metrics at once spreads attention thin and makes retrospectives harder to focus. Once your baseline is clear, add more as your process matures.
The Definition of Done and acceptance criteria do similar things, but they are not the same. Mixing them up creates gaps that surface at the worst possible time.
Acceptance criteria are specific to a single user story. They describe the conditions under which that story is considered complete from the product owner’s perspective. Your QA team uses them to write test cases and decide what counts as a pass.
The Definition of Done applies across all stories and all sprints. It is the shared checklist your entire team agrees on: code reviewed, tests written and passing, documentation updated, performance benchmarks met. A story can satisfy its acceptance criteria and still fail the DoD if, for example, automated test coverage was not added.
For Scrum agile QA, both need to be defined before development starts, not after. Here is what that looks like in practice:
When acceptance criteria are missing or unclear, testers end up guessing what the product owner wanted. That guess is often wrong, and the story gets reopened after the sprint review. Setting a rule that no story enters a sprint without testable acceptance criteria removes that problem before it starts.
Agile is the philosophy your team follows. Scrum is the specific system that defines your roles, ceremonies, and sprint structure.
Agile gives you the big-picture values for iterative development. Scrum? It hands you the actual playbook – specific roles, ceremonies, and artifacts you’ll use every sprint.
In Scrum, you’re not just “the tester” anymore. You’re part of a cross-functional team where everyone owns quality. Start each sprint planning by asking “How will we test this?” rather than waiting until development’s done.
The roles thing is huge. While Agile talks about self-organizing teams, Scrum actually defines who does what – Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team. This clarity prevents those awkward moments where nobody knows who makes the call.
One thing that catches people off-guard: Agile can spread across entire organizations, but Scrum stays laser-focused on product delivery within those 1-4 week sprints.
In Scrum, testing becomes everyone’s responsibility throughout the sprint – not something you squeeze in at the end. Companies using this approach see defect rates drop by nearly half compared to traditional handoff methods.
The aqua dev team moved from Scrum to Kanban to ship daily, cutting the time from user story to release by roughly 400%. A feature is released after it goes through one or two reviews and passes automated tests. There is no wait for other stakeholders or any arbitrary cutoff point.Ā
Our team moved to Kanban after visualising tasks on a value stream map. It shows how long it takes to go through all statuses before a task is completed. The results were pretty eye-opening.
Normally, we would:
The obvious bottleneck was to move away from quarterly releases. That shaved off up to two months depending on the task. The next logical step was moving away from end-of-the-sprint releases. Now, we are looking at 43 days from creating a user story to releasing a feature, which is a ~400% boost year-over-year.
Get a testing strategy template that enables us to release 2 times faster
These tips come from teams that have made Scrum testing work under real sprint pressure, not ideal conditions.
Hereās a bit of a curveball: the best tip for your Agile testing may be resorting to regular testing. It is a much slower, but also more predictable methodology that makes it easier to ensure high test coverage. Have a look at our comparison of Agile testing vs traditional testing before you proceed.Ā
Dan Wilson, former End-User Director at Hertz, suggests that companies arrange testing rules based on risks from potential changes.Ā
This approach strikes a balance between speed, quality, and effort. If something slipped past automated testing, it shouldnāt affect too many people.Ā
Another prominent specialist recommends taking up the continuous quality approach.
āContinuous quality encourages a holistic and proactive approach, with functional and nonfunctional requirements driving the design, development and delivery of products. Quality is likely redefined for the organisation, as it relates to its digital business strategy. What was once a method of control is becoming more about coaching a team toward achieving business goals, and gaining competitive advantage in the market through superior quality that is measured based on business goals and outcomes.ā
We have previously dived into continuous testing ourselves as well. Find the 10 benefits of adopting it (itās more than āqualityā and āspeedā) in our blog article.Ā
aqua centralizes your requirements, test cases, and defect tracking in one place.
Shift-left testing focuses on performing tests earlier in the lifecycle with a heavier emphasis on unit tests rather than end-to-end or UI tests. This often involves developers writing and running tests before the code even makes it to the QA team.Ā
As of last year, our developers would create tests, but they were much heavier than the regular unit tests. This year, we have implemented a tool to track unit test coverage and increase it by 10% every week. We ultimately reached the industry standard of 80% without significantly increasing the time to write code.
Every night, we automatically build the environment to run all tests and see if the upcoming release is shippable. If it is not, the testers and devs work in the morning to resolve bugs and release a new version.
Shift-right testing is post-release testing in the production environment. It also works well with our daily release strategy where we may have changes of different risks and/or known errors. Sometimes, these known issues can be severe enough for the new feature to break existing functionality.
Our releases with āundercookedā functionality utilise feature flags that allow us to ship a build with new features disabled by default. Once that build is shipped, we have the next morning to go through tests again and resolve defects. Now that it is production-ready, this functionality can be enabled for individual or all users without us releasing a new build.
The testing best practice would be to convince the devs of the value of testing their own code. They shouldn't be able to say a story is done until it's tested. If they are the only members of the scrum team, it's their job to test it.
Gartnerās Senior Director Analyst Mike West highlights the value of black box testing to avoid making tests that are too similar to the code. Although making people unfamiliar with the code create tests is a good tactic, you can do more.
āMany agile teams take this process further by writing the test before writing the code. This reduces the risk that embedded QA resources will be too close ā thus biassed ā to the implementation of the solution when they test it. By designing the test before the code is built, the test becomes a confirmation that the implementation meets the original requirements. It also allows defects caused by misinterpretation of the requirements to be found early, when they can be more easily fixed.ā
Testing legacy code becomes a huge issue for unit testing, as thatās where you will find the biggest discrepancy in coverage. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer: you will have to cover old code with unit tests of good quality. Relying on end-to-end tests alone is not feasible: this is both time-consuming and expensive.
The good news is that covering legacy code becomes easier as you move, with the team getting more comfortable around test coverage tracking tools. If you have had the proper unit testing for a while, new features will not add up much to the backlog. The light at the end of the tunnel truly becomes closer day by day and week by week.
Good automated testing goes a long way. We at aqua took an effort to stabilise over 400 automated tests so that it takes a few hours at max to either spot a bug or find a potential issue with the test. From that on, we moved to TestProject for writing and executing new automated tests, a very sustainable and visual solution for testing our application.
Automation done the right way makes a huge difference to test management. This is even more relevant for early testing. For aqua, a full run of automated end-to-end tests takes 12 hours (and that would have been days manually). All unit tests, however, can be executed in as little as 20 minutes.
We used to handle test environments the traditional way, which meant a lot of manual work just to keep a single consistent configuration. This was both tedious and not necessarily reflective of the production environment. This approach also limited the QA team to working in the same handcrafted test environment.
Adopting Infrastructure as Code considerably freed up everyoneās work schedule. The test environment is now created automatically upon new code delivery. The same environment can be used by multiple QA specialists in parallel for running manual and automated tests. Such auto-generated environments practically mirror the production environment, eliminating the need for a dedicated replica (stage environment).
Alas, even the most Scrum-ready teams may struggle to follow the principles when hindered by the wrong tools. Using Excel for test cases certainly does not bring the required transparency and flexibility. You need a software test tool that supports one of the practical Agile-inspired methodologies.Ā
It is even better when such a tool can also be used by your entire team. aqua cloud is such a tool: you can use it for all steps of product development, from gathering requirements to implementation and QA.
Your Scrum testing gets stronger when you build real collaboration around modern approaches like Behavior-Driven Development. Tools like Gherkin don’t just bridge communication gaps. They actually shift quality ownership across your entire squad. Product owners, developers, and testers start speaking the same language, which nearly doubles requirement clarity in most teams.
Throw in AI-powered testing tools and things get interesting. They’re smart enough to spot which tests matter most and catch those annoying flaky tests that slow down your sprints. One concrete step you can take today: set up a simple real-time dashboard that shows your CI/CD pipeline health. This visibility alone helps teams catch bottlenecks faster.
Teams using this combo report that their retrospectives become way more productive, because everyone’s actually looking at the same data.
Scrum is the practical implementation of the Agile philosophy. Using the right manual or automated testing tool for Agile testing can speed up release time for new features by up to 400%. You can achieve sizable improvements as the product development alone, but going Agile the right way is a company-wide effort.Ā
We see how crucial speed, flexibility, and efficiency are in these Scrum practices. In QA, some of them come from your time management, personal approach and attitude. However, the other ones could be optimised massively through using a powerful TMS.
That is where aqua cloud comes into play. Talking about efficiency? aqua delivers the German quality with 100% precision, leaving nothing behind. With aqua, youāll save hours every sprint through AI-powered requirements, test cases, and test data creation. Also, youāll make sure there is no coverage gaps faster than ever. Youāll have 100% visibility across all your testing activities, with detailed, customisable reports. Having communication problems between devs and testers? Our native integration with Capture makes sure you get the most visual bug-tracking collaboration ever. Built with flexibility in mind, aqua cloud is the ultimate solution you go for in your Scrum practices.
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To use Scrum in Agile effectively, start by defining clear roles and responsibilities for the Scrum Team, including the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team. Create and prioritise a product backlog, then break the project into time-boxed iterations called sprints, typically lasting 2-4 weeks (depending on the teamās decision). During each sprint, the team works to deliver a potentially shippable increment of product functionality based on the prioritised items from the backlog. Conduct daily stand-up meetings to synchronise activities and hold sprint reviews and retrospective meetings at the end of each sprint to gather feedback and reflect on the process. By following these key practices, teams can harness the power of Scrum to manage Agile projects efficiently and deliver value iteratively.
To use Scrum in Agile, begin by forming a dedicated Scrum Team comprising the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team. Clarify the roles and responsibilities of each team member to ensure clear understanding and accountability. Establish a product backlog, a prioritised list of all desired features, enhancements, and fixes. Hold a sprint planning meeting to select backlog items to work on during the sprint and define the tasks required to complete them. Set the duration of the sprint, typically 2-4 weeks, and start the sprint by initiating daily stand-up meetings to synchronise activities and discuss progress. Conduct sprint review and retrospective meetings at the end of each sprint to gather feedback, reflect on the process, and identify areas for improvement. Following these initial steps, teams can lay the foundation for implementing Scrum effectively in their Agile software development projects.
Agile Scrum testing is a methodology that leverages the Agile Scrum framework to coordinate and organise the software testing process. The goal is to integrate testing into each sprint, allowing for early feedback and continuous improvement. This approach emphasises collaboration between cross-functional teams, including developers, testers, product owners, and stakeholders, to deliver high-quality software products in an efficient and iterative manner.
Here are the 3 key differences between Scrum and Agile:
The 5 principles of Scrum are:
Track defect escape rate, test case pass rate, and Definition of Done compliance across sprints. If escape rate drops and pass rate stays above 85%, your QA process is working. Retrospective action item completion rate above 60% signals your team is improving, not just discussing.
QA sets the testability bar for the DoD. Your team defines which testing steps must be completed before a story closes: automated coverage added, regression suite passing, performance benchmarks met. Without QA input, DoD criteria tend to reflect development completion, not verified quality.
