Features Must Wait for a Separate QA Team Before Shipping

What you are seeing

Development marks a story done. It moves to a “ready for QA” column and waits. The QA team has its own sprint, its own backlog, and its own capacity constraints. The feature sits for three days before a QA engineer picks it up. Testing takes another two days. Feedback arrives a week after development completed. The developer has moved on to other work and has to reload context to address the comments.

Near release time, QA becomes a bottleneck. Many features arrive at once, QA capacity cannot absorb them all, and some features are held over to the next release. Defects found late in QA are more expensive to fix because other work has been built on top of the untested code. The team’s release dates become determined by QA queue depth, not by development completion.

Common causes

Siloed QA Team

When quality assurance is a separate team rather than a shared practice embedded in development, testing becomes a handoff rather than a continuous activity. Developers write code and hand it to QA. QA tests it and hands defects back. The two teams operate on different cadences. Because quality is seen as QA’s responsibility, developers write less thorough tests of their own - why duplicate the effort? The siloed structure makes late testing the structural default rather than an avoidable outcome.

Read more: Siloed QA Team

QA Signoff as a Release Gate

When QA sign-off is a formal gate that must be passed before any release, the gate creates a queue. Features arrive at the gate in batches. QA must process all of them before anything ships. If QA finds a defect, the release waits while it is fixed and retested. The gate structure means quality problems are found late, in large batches, making them expensive to fix and disruptive to release schedules.

Read more: QA Signoff as a Release Gate

How to narrow it down

1. Is there a “waiting for QA” column on the board, and do items spend days there? If work regularly accumulates waiting for QA to pick it up, the team has a handoff bottleneck rather than a continuous quality practice. Start with Siloed QA Team.
2. Can the team deploy without QA sign-off? If QA approval is a required step before any production release, the gate creates batch testing and late defect discovery. Start with QA Signoff as a Release Gate.

Related Content

• Security Review Bottleneck - Same structural pattern with a security team gate
• Change Management Overhead - Additional approval gates that accumulate before release
• Waiting on Platform Team - Related cross-team dependency pattern
• Siloed QA Team - QA as a separate function rather than shared practice
• QA Signoff as a Release Gate - Formal gate that creates batch testing and late feedback