The work kept moving, but the queue never did. And somehow, QA was always the one left holding the bag.
The sprint retrospective was still lingering in her mind as she stepped into the passport office. As the Project Manager working on an Industry 4.0 product, she had taken the day off, hoping the passport renewal process would be quick. But the line barely moved. There were at least ten counters open, and most officers didn’t even have anyone in front of them. Still, the queue stood still. She tapped her phone, glanced around, and finally asked someone what the delay was.
She smiled politely, but something inside her shifted. Reflecting on the situation at the passport office, she mulled why this was happening. Wasn’t it obvious that if one person was handling everything, the line would always crawl? Why hadn’t anyone planned the counters around the real bottleneck? In that quiet, bureaucratic chaos, she saw her QA team. One member, buried in builds, was always brought in too late.
Everyone assumed they’d test at the end…but no one realised that this was exactly what was turning QA into the constraint, release after release. The more they were pushed to the end, the more they quietly became the bottleneck everyone overlooked, until it was too late and the sprint had already drifted off track. No one ever said it, but they were always acting like they could somehow absorb the backlog, even when they were already stretched thin.
It wasn’t that her own supplier team wasn’t testing enough, she knew that too well. For weeks now, every sprint retrospective had circled back to the same thing: “Why aren’t we catching issues earlier?” It always started like an open question, but somehow, by the end, it landed on QA. Deep down, everyone knew why, they just didn’t want to say it out loud. The QA member was always stuck waiting for builds, sometimes they’d land just hours before release. No prep time. No buddy testing. No chance to dig deeper up front. Each late build turned QA into the bottleneck no one wanted to admit was there. It wasn’t that they weren’t working hard enough. They just didn’t have the space to do it right, and everyone kind of knew it.
Back at the office the next day, she didn’t bring up the passport queue. But she did walk over to the supplier team’s Project Manager. “We keep loading QA at the end of the sprint,” she said. “They’re not slow. We’re just not giving them the space to succeed.” He nodded almost immediately. Yeah, everything lands with them at the very end and then we expect quality.
The problem wasn’t that QA wasn’t testing enough. That line from the last retro kept echoing in her head: “Why is no one catching issues early?” But no one had stopped to ask the obvious. Did QA even have the chance to? They were always getting the build last. Sometimes just hours before the release. No prep time. No buddy testing. No space to think. And definitely no space to ask questions.
Every time, they were just reacting. Never setting the tone. So of course bugs slipped. Of course feedback came late. And of course, it looked like QA was holding things up. But the truth was that QA had become the constraint. Not because they were slow. Because they were left out too long.They didn’t need a big process change. They just needed the rhythm to shift. QA wasn’t something you plug in after development ends.
Otherwise, they were always going to look like the blocker.
Even when they weren’t.
And most importantly, they needed to stop being handed surprise builds at the last minute. They agreed to set auto cut-off times. If builds missed that window, they’d roll into the next sprint. No manual override without visibility. Three sprints later, the changes had already started showing. QA had time to think. Bugs were caught before features were marked done. The dev team began involving them in early conversations. Releases were cleaner. No chaos at the end. Just flow. Even the client noticed. On a review call, someone from their side smiled and said, “Hey, whatever changed last month, we’re seeing it. The builds are stronger. QA is catching things we didn’t even spot in our own checks. Keep going.”
The shift wasn’t just visible. It was measurable. Roughly 5% effort was saved each release not from cutting corners, but from reducing rework, unplanned firefighting, and late-cycle surprises. That day at the passport office, she hadn’t solved anything. She’d just seen clearly what she had been ignoring.
5%
The bottleneck isn’t always about speed. Sometimes, it’s about who no one’s planning around. And until you change that, the queue will never move. Your QA shouldn’t be the surprise. It should be the strength. If you’re scaling fast, but testing feels like a bottleneck, let’s connect. Write to us at info@wonderbiz.in
Key Takeaway
Quality stopped being a bottleneck the day we stopped treating QA as an afterthought
and started treating them as the constraint to plan around.
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