Engineering and quality leaders do a good job of telling a technical story, such as explaining the testing activities and how they plan to optimize the development process. Unfortunately, most miss the other side of the story, the part that clearly shows how the work they do adds value to their customers and contributes toward business growth.
Similarly, some times the business doesn’t share with the engineering teams what its goals are in a clear manner.
The person in charge of leading quality inside a company can vary widely.
If the person leading quality is not high enough in the hierarchy of the company, this can lead to problems concerning quality.
“Improving QA” has to be more than just eliminating the bottlenecks. It has to be about delivering quality as perceived by the customer.
The focus of QA should always go beyond the quality of the process of delivering software.
A quality narrative is the way people think and talk about quality in a company.
Understanding how to talk about quality by starting with its revenue potential and then discussing savings and risk mitigation is an important step to having people look at quality teams not as a cost center, but as an asset that can help contribute to company growth.
It is important to explain our value in terms that the business understands. A different approach is necessary when talking to the development teams we are working with.
Customer issues impact your company and company issues can impact your career. We call these “the 3Cs.”
This observation might resonate even with people that are not interested in the user experience.
Automation is marketed as a way to perform more testing (i.e., scale) with the same resources.
Everybody seems to want more testing but they are not really interested in investing in it.
When things begin to break, it’s not necessarily a sign that your QA has begun to fail. It could just indicate that your needs have changed and so you need to change your strategy to succeed.
Even in Agile products that we iterate on everything, sometimes we fail to iterate on our quality strategy.
The (quality) bar is even higher for B2B products, especially in mature industries like banking and insurance. Developing an app in an environment like that necessitates moving slower and keeping quality higher before release, despite being in the validation stage.
A good reminder that we need to make distinctions between B2B and B2C products.
Feedback loops help us focus on getting information on product quality to the team as fast as possible….starting by determining what type of feedback you need gives you a better indicator as to what testing type is most suitable.
Improving quality in your company isn’t only about testing. It’s also about having an infrastructure that allows issues to be fixed quickly.
Customers can be more forgiving if the issues they face are fixed fast.
It’s important to note, however, that testing in production doesn’t make sense for every product and isn’t a replacement for doing other forms of testing. It’s just yet another tool to gather information along the continuous testing spectrum.
If testing is information gathering and experimentation, there is no reason not to have a “testing look” on your productive environment.
You can cut your testing time in half and see zero effect on sales or revenue. You can decrease the number of bugs found to nearly nothing and not see a spike in your number of active users. Ultimately, the metrics your testing team focus on should improve overall company growth.
A good growth metric sits at a high enough level that no single team moves it all by themselves.
How many engineering teams have clear growth metrics and even more importantly how many of them have shared metrics?
Create a crystal-clear vision of where you’re going, understand your starting point, and evaluate the multiple paths you can choose that define your strategy.
Leadership skills also play a big role when you want to bring people along and embrace your vision.
Remember, if you’re not confused while thinking through your strategy process, you’re probably not doing it right.
Check Quotes & Notes for a full list of the books I have taken notes on.
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More Questions Than Answers 