Re-building credibility

Problem

I was working in a team that was using waterfall model within a sprint. All development has to be completed followed by testing. Side effect of this was stories would get pushed out of sprint because testing could not be completed within the sprint timeframe even though development was complete. This was a continuous trend across sprints. Sprint demos were held with larger groups including business teams and they were losing confidence in team's ability to deliver as agreed upon.

Actions taken

Collected data for last 6 months to how average number of stories that were pushed out because of this symptom. Got buy-in from team and leads on if we could try a different approach to re-building credibility. Testing will begin as story begins for development. All use cases will be identified and automated using stubs. As soon as a story is completed, another engineer will pick it up for testing manually or in automated fashion. This story will now go through "show and tell" in daily scrum. This distributed the task of testing throughout the sprint improving odds of completing the story within the sprint.

Lessons learned

Provide data to the team to challenge if current approach is working or not. Identify small changes that will help the team in a positive way.