Testing earlier assures better quality. But maybe most important, things like agile and DevOps—which encourage that you shift your testing left and allow for more collaboration between different parts of your team—have broken down the walls that previously separated testers for the rest of the organization.

Failure is measured by expectations. If we aim to be perfect, or set the expectation that only perfection is acceptable, we risk losing opportunities to get valuable feedback. Creating an expectation of perfection can lead to stagnation, not success. Instead, view failure as a learning experience.

The entire agile team needs to be involved in a continuous process of identifying ways to simplify work, right up until a story is complete. Smaller stories ensure that development work is rapid and trackable. Mitch Goldstein details how to focus on breaking stories down into a more estimable, “digestible” size.