Agile means quicker delivery, it does not mean the quality part should be ignored. In this fast paced development and handover of the quality product or service is also considered as a key matter to ensure valuable delivery, and final products are ready to meet customer needs and fulfil their satisfaction.
A focus on quality, secure reliability, reduces re-work burdens, and encourages continuous improvement, all these factors lead to a customer satisfaction and business success. There are a lot of Agile quality strategies that are followed in practice. In this article we can take a look about some of the main strategies needs to follow to improve quality final delivery of products and projects.
Understanding Agile Quality Management:
Agile quality management is an integral and important part of Agile methodology, specifically focusing on creating quality software or any products from the very beginning, instead of just evaluating the quality for it at the project closing phase.
A scrum Master should be an advocate for implementing Agile Quality Strategies, and ensure his/her team follows best practices to deliver high quality products. This CSM Training by Scrum Alliance prepares Scrum Masters or Professionals working in Scrum Framework with skills like facilitation, servant leadership, and sprint planning to effectively implement Scrum strategies.
Top Agile Quality Strategies Every Team Should Use
Quality is embedded in Agile Values. Scrum teams integrate quality at every step, here’s how the main Agile Quality strategies come into real-world practice, driving consistent, customer-focused results. The PSM certification by Scrum.org’s teaches you Agile Quality strategies through Scrum principles.
Test-Driven Development (TDD):
TDD is a software development quality assurance approach that before writing actual code, write code in a test environment. This ensures that code works as expected from the beginning. It reduces the overengineering, improves focus, and ensures test coverage from the start.
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD):
Using this methodology, developers focus on defining and testing software behaviour from a user’s perspective, using simple language scenarios to ensure clear communication and shared understanding between developers, testers, and business stakeholders. It is a complementary or extended version of TDD with more business-readable cases.
Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD):
Continuous Integration (CI) means developers frequently merge their code changes into a shared respiratory like Jenkins or GitLab CI, their automated tests run to find errors early.
Continuous Delivery (CD) means on the other side once code passes the automated tests, it’s automatically prepared for release to a testing or staging environment, ensuring codes are always for deployment.
Both combined set up an automated workflow that streamlines the entire software development process, from code changes to deployment.
Regular Testing:
Regular testing is mostly used in the software development field to check all the functions repeatedly to ensure it works correctly and doesn’t have any issues.
Automated Regression Testing:
This type of testing method used in agile software development, to test software frequently, ensure that changes in new code does not break existing features. This saves the stability and quality of the software in each iteration. It protects against unintended side effects and supports rapid, reliable software releases.
Code Reviews and Pair Programming:
Two sets of eyes are better than one. Pair programming means two developers working together on the same code, sharing a keyboard and screen, for real-time coordination and knowledge sharing. So it improves code quality in real-time.
In a code review system, one developer examines the code written by another one like a peer review system. This process helps ensure code quality from even minor mistakes, identify bugs.
Refactoring:
Refactoring in Agile means restructuring existing code to improve its quality and maintainability without changing its functionality. It’s dealing with making the code cleaner, easier to understand, and easier to modify, all these things ensure software works as per planned.
Refactoring focuses only on the internal structure of the code, not adding new features or fixing bugs.
Definition of Done (DoD) with Quality Built In
This method is based on “ Have a clear, shared understanding of “done”. This Definition of Done (DoD) is an agreement between team members that sets clear expectations for when a task or project is considered done and ready to go. So your DoD checklist should include quality gates like code reviews, passing all tests, meeting performance benchmarks, and documentation updates
Create Checklist: Teams needs to be agreed on a checklist that contains:
| Code reviewed | Done or Not |
| Tests passed | Done or Not |
| Documentation updated | Done or Not |
| No critical bugs | Done or Not |
| Meets acceptance criteria | Done or Not |
This review is marked at every sprint review or demo. It sets a shared quality standard and avoids incomplete or buggy features being marked as “done.”
Agile Metrics that Prioritize Quality
Track what truly matters. Agile metrics are used to track how well the development process works and how good the final product is, instead of the quantity of the work done. Metrics like defect escape rate, code coverage, cycle time, and customer satisfaction help teams spot and fix problems early.
Team Culture of Quality Ownership
Quality is everyone’s job. Encourage culture with developers, testers, and product owners all are take responsibility for delivering quality output. Defects aren’t “someone else’s problem.” Teams celebrate quality-focused wins and learn from mistakes.
This builds accountability, transparency, and pride guts among teams in delivering value.
Technical Debt Management:
Going with shortcuts becomes long-term problems. In Agile it’s easy to achieve quicker delivery. But ignoring technical debt (shortcuts or compromises in software development to meet deadlines) takes to performance issues and makes it harder to maintain code. This management strategy is about finding balance between speed and quality to make sure long-term maintainability and efficiency.
Allocate 10-20% of sprint capacity to address this debt and improve code quality.
Conclusion:
In Agile, it’s all about quicker delivery and being adaptable, but that shouldn’t mean sacrificing quality. The strategies above aren’t just practices; they are mindsets. Agile Quality Strategies is about building quality in from the beginning, instead of checking at the end. It provides a solid way to achieve great technical results, deliver value more quickly, and keep up in a fast-changing environment.
