Being the only QA in a 6-dev scrum team: honest notes

Let me tell you what agile scrum actually looks like when you're the only QA on a team of six developers. The sprint planning deck will say "shift left" and "quality is everyone's responsibility". The retro board will have sticky notes about collaboration. And then somewhere around 4pm on a Friday, someone will drop a Slack message that says "hey, can you just run through it real quick before we deploy?" That's the job. The rest is paperwork. The blocker problem In every scrum team I've joined as the single tester, there's a moment around sprint three where I stop being "the QA" and start being "the blocker". You can feel it shift. A dev finishes a ticket on Wednesday. It sits in your column until Friday because you're still testing the three tickets from Monday. Burndown chart flattens. Somebody mentions it in standup. Suddenly the conversation is about your throughput, not about the fact that five people are producing work faster than one person can verify it. I used to try to explai