Lean from the Trenches

Continuous System Test

The Kanban system helped us see that we needed to do system test continuously (well, regularly at least), instead of saving it until the end. The test team resisted this initially, since system test takes time and it felt inefficient to do it more than once in the release cycle. But that is an illusion. It may seem more effective to do test only at the end, but if we include bug-fixing time in the equation, it is significantly less effective.

Here’s what testing at the end typically looks like in a two-month release cycle:

And here is what it typically looks like if we do it more often:

We can’t test the whole system ...