Quality Assurance & Compliance Flashcards

What is 'technical debt' and how does it relate to agile quality?

Answer: The cost of future rework caused by choosing quick, low-quality solutions over proper ones

Technical debt represents the implied future cost of rework incurred when teams take shortcuts, and if left unmanaged it degrades quality and slows delivery over time.

Which agile ceremony is most directly focused on improving team quality practices?

Answer: Sprint retrospective

The sprint retrospective is specifically dedicated to inspecting how the team works and identifying improvements to processes, practices, and quality standards.

A stakeholder asks to skip testing in the current sprint to meet a deadline. What is the best agile response?

Answer: Explain that reducing quality now will increase defect costs and slow future sprints

Skipping testing accumulates technical debt and defects that will cost far more to fix later; teams should transparently communicate this trade-off to stakeholders.

What is behavior-driven development (BDD) primarily designed to improve?

Answer: Collaboration between developers, testers, and business stakeholders on shared acceptance criteria written as scenarios

BDD uses natural-language scenarios (Given-When-Then) to align developers, testers, and business stakeholders on expected behavior before code is written.

In a heavily regulated environment, an agile team should treat audit trails as:

Answer: Living documentation produced continuously as part of the team's normal workflow

Audit trails should be generated as a natural by-product of agile workflows (e.g., version control, CI logs, story acceptance sign-offs) rather than created retrospectively.

Which metric best indicates whether an agile team is improving its quality over time?

Answer: Decreasing number of defects escaping to production over successive sprints

A declining escaped-defect rate over time is the clearest signal that a team's quality practices are genuinely improving and catching issues earlier.

How does the agile principle of 'working software over comprehensive documentation' apply to compliance-heavy projects?

Answer: Working software is still the primary measure of progress, but necessary compliance artifacts are produced efficiently alongside it

Even in regulated contexts, working software remains the core deliverable, but teams integrate required compliance artifacts into their workflow rather than treating documentation as a substitute for delivery.