Scott Bellware (who finally started blogging again), is posting a series on Sustaining Capacity in Maturing Agile Software Teams. It's worth a read, and may be familiar territory to anyone who has done Agile and been reading about Lean.

In the 3rd Post - Recognizing Entropy - he talks specifically about synchronizing the development testing and QA testing efforts:

Development and QA Test Synchronization. Without greater synchronization between development and QA testing, valuable input often comes too late in a development or release cycle to be effective. Test design and test architecture are valuable inputs to development, and software design and architecture are valuable inputs to QA testing. Teams often loose unrealized capacity by not pursuing means to do more development and testing in parallel.

This one really hit home for me, and is a shining beacon to the problems that my current team is going to face, soon. We had our first iteration planning and kickoff meeting yesterday, and the whole team was involved - except the testers from the QA department. For reasons that I have no control over (and honestly - they are legitimate business reasons), the QA department is not coming on to the project for another 2 months (at least).  Today, the team leadership was discussing how the QA personnel would create their test scenarios, and I brought up the point that creating the test scenarios after-the-fact (after the iterations are done) is going to be very problematic.

If a dev team is working from User Stories, and those User Stories are divided along various aspects of behavior, it is very likely that a single screen, workflow, or 'function' of a system is going to be divided into multiple user stories. When the QA team is involved with testing in parallel with the development team, this is not an issue because the QA team will be updating their test scenarios in each iteration. This allows them to keep the scenarios for a given screen, workflow, or 'function' of the system, growing over time. However, since our QA team is going to come into the project at least 2 months after the development team has started coding and testing, the QA team would have to sift through all of the current and previous iteration stories, try and aggregate them down into the screen, workflow, or 'function' of the system, and build test scenarios from there. If there is even a modest number of stories to sift through, this would be a daunting task for the QA team - they would be in a 'catch-up' mode from the beginning of their QA cycle, likely through the end of the project.

As a result of the QA team being unable to join our project immediately, we are forced to modify our entire development process and account for the needs of the QA team, after the fact. Essentially, we are creating additional swim-lanes for our stories to travel through, during an iteration:

1. Backlog
2. In Development
3. Developer Testing
4. Ad-Hoc Testing (BA's, Developers, etc. testing the app)
5. QA Functional Spec Documentation
6. Done

Swim-lane #4 and #5 are directly affected by the QA team not being able to enter the project immediately, and are causing the rest of the team to lower it's capacity. We (developers and BA's) are now required to do our own ad-hoc testing during the iterations, instead of letting the QA team take care of that; and we (the developers and BA's) are now required to create functional specifications, based on the user stories that are completed, to hand to the QA team once they are on the project. The functional specification documents will need to be updated for any given User Story, before the ticket is considered complete (the functional spec updates have become an acceptance criteria on every User Story).

End result - because we cannot get the QA team on our project immediately, and ensure that they are testing in parallel to the developers, we as the development team are losing capacity and building entropy from the very first day of the very first iteration.