Quality Assurance in Agile - Drive Towards Achieving Excellence

Agility has now become important with growing dynamics in business everywhere in order to respond rapidly to the changing needs of their customers while producing good quality software at a faster rate.Agile Methods though are known to have built-in quality management system, but software organizations are facing various challenges in real life scenarios on how to ensure quality when transitioning from traditional method to Agile development methods. Traditional Quality Assurance techniques are reporting based and rely on heavy weight inspection methods whereas Agile quality assurance techniques are supposed to be built-in daily activities by teams. Therefore, cultural and teams mindset has direct influence on quality of product being developed in Agile. It is questionable and not, yet, clear if agile and lightweight methods cater for a flexible, lightweight quality or if traditional development methods provide scientific reasoning that is not offered by agile methods. In this paper we aim to study what are the challenges faced in software quality assurance in Agile and how Agile methods can achieve software quality while also comparing them with traditional quality support processes. We extend the study to then analyze key drivers of quality in Agile and quality techniques that are integrated into Agile processes thus validating the hypothesis that ?Agile have built in quality systems and produces good quality software?.Through this study we aim to provide some suggestions to help organizations overcome obstacles expected in adopting the agile method as software development tool and ensuring quality.