Project Development Iterations

One of the things I like about where I work is the freedom different development teams have in trying new things with respect to work practices. We are currently starting version 1.5 of a project and one of the developers wanted to try a different way of structuring our iterations to minimise the issues we had in version 1.0 and to improve the overall quality of the project being developed.

The main issue we wanted to fix is developers getting too far ahead of testers - we had a two week iterative process where the developers would code for two weeks straight and then on day 10 they would provide a build to test. Then they would continue on as fast as they could.

This was a problem, they kept on getting further and further away from the testers because new code ranked higher in their eyes than old code did. Therefore some bug fixes took a long time to come, this hampered testing.

So one of the developers suggested a different iteration configuration. An iteration still lasts two weeks but there are five days for development of new code and five days for testing. The final day of development involves preparing the deployment for test. The final day of testing involves preparing the deployment for User Acceptance Testing.


Today was the first day of the first testing phase and so far so good. Defects were raised (not that many which impressed me for day one code) and fixes are already being prepared. Beyond that developers have realised they've made a mistake in one place and as they have the time, they are checking for similar problems in other areas. Proactive bug fixing, another plus.


Now, you may be wondering how complex code can be with five days of development including unit testing. Well for starters the number of developers double the testers but this is a small iteration task wise. Not all will be though so we are breaking our iteration tasks up into two groups. Single iteration tasks and double iteration tasks.

Every second iteration will see the deployment of more complex functionality that cannot be implemented in 5 days (effectively 15 days). As testers I am happy with this, we know these larger tasks are coming in advance and can plan for their arrival. We also still get five days of dedicated developer bug fixing after its delivery.

Both the development and testing teams are aware that the potential for the number of defects to still be greater than what the developers can fix in five days (especially if there are some doozies). To combat this (as what should have always be done), defects have priority one in the iteration following their discovery and as testers we're obliged to ensure that all new code gets at least a once-over to gauge the quality of the build.

Time will tell if policy this works, but at least we are working together to solve our past mistakes.