This is a guest post by Cameron Laird
In today’s rapidly evolving tech world, quality is the key differentiator between products on the market. If testing is seen as an after-thought in your team’s software development lifecycle (SDLC)—or even viewed as a single step in your SDLC—then most likely, your product will not be well-tested and QA will be seen as a barrier to releases. As a leader on your QA team, you can take a leading role in cultural change as your team migrates to more modern practices, including DevOps, Continuous Testing, CI/CD, distributed collaboration, and analytics-savvy functionality. Organizations need conceptual change even more than technological boosts, and QA has crucial strengths to effect that change.
Here are three winning action plans to change your QA culture and integrate it more closely with the rest of your SDLC:
No one else in your organization has the knowledge you do about QA’s power to improve the SDLC. Concepts that are routine to you are unknown or surprising to others. Think through these three strategies for success and others will be able to understand there’s more to QA than just holding up releases.
While your team can adjust these three points to specific situations, you’ll make plenty of progress even if you adopt them as written here.
Each of the paragraphs below can be a SMART goal, one that is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. The KPIs below aren’t written as textbook concepts that someone could measure in principle; the idea is that you pick a few, put them into practice, post daily updates, talk them over with others, and give the organization a chance to experience what they teach on a daily basis.
Bug counts are essential. Continue to report them. That said, whenever possible, focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) expressed as costs, values, or risks. “Our testers identified 53 defects in the last week” reinforces that QA is a cost center. When you reframe the same reality as, “we identified and were able to resolve 3 critical defects with a high risk for customers last week”, “we have lowered the average time-to-detect from 87 to 11 days”, or, even better, “the bugs we found in the last week represent $33,420 in customer-support savings”, you help the organization understand that QA is an investment and not simply a cost-center.
A huge range of KPIs is in use in organizations worldwide. As an introduction to the possibilities, consider which of these your organization might be able to calculate and appreciate:
Why these twelve? They’re a mix of KPIs that have proven advantageous in QA as measurable, historically effective, and diverse enough to illuminate your department’s biggest challenges.
Are you just starting your KPI program? Start small and learn what KPIs work for you. These three KPIs, in particular, are crucial to start tracking early:
You’ll review your KPI portfolio repeatedly; there are always new insights to learn and adjustments to make. Your judgment needs to be at its best when assessing KPIs. An example: reliance entirely on legacy KPIs familiar to the organization limits discoveries. If you introduce too many new KPIs, you risk overwhelming your organization and having any confusion and even rejection wipe out potential gains. At all times, look for KPIs that reinforce the point that properly-executed QA helps create more valuable products faster.
KPIs themselves are business investments. Practice with a dozen or so, like the ones above, and learn which ones are meaningful to other departments, good guides to action, and motivational (while inexpensive to measure). If your KPIs are private affairs, known only to you and your supervisor, their accomplishment is limited. When your team or morning scrum starts to have conversations about specific measured KPIs you’ve chosen, though, you’ll know you’re making a difference.
The most challenging and most consequential work a QA Director does is to promote a winning QA culture. If you want to raise the standard of your quality culture, or establish a new one, the first thing you need to do is make sure that your company values are clearly defined. Think about the values your company already has in place – do these speak to quality? Are these values ones that you want? Is there room for improvement?
Are your QA employees eager to automate tests that can be automated and proud of their skill in reliably executing tests that are not yet automated? Do they understand that the point of meetings is to decide on actions that are actually undertaken and completed? Are QA workers able to communicate effectively with peers and with team members outside QA? Does your QA staff have the attitude that it makes progress every workday, wherever in the product development cycle it happens to fall? If your employees don’t have these instincts now, what are you doing to cultivate them? Do you communicate your vision for QA so that it’s easy for them to understand what they should do? How do you remove the barriers to doing the right thing and encourage the expectation that the whole team will execute effectively every single workday?
With the right culture in place, the QA team takes the initiative and looks for ways to involve QA throughout the SDLC. Analyze your department’s existing culture, and think about what decisions you’ll make that can bring that culture closer to the one you want.
Too many organizations regard QA as a barrier to common goals: QA is a hurdle between a product and its customers, QA lengthens time-to-market, and so on. Departments focused on delivering value to buyers should be skeptical of anything that stands in their way. Then, the great opportunity is to demonstrate how QA is part of the solution.
QA can be a barrier when it’s managed as something that happens only at the end of product development. When an SDLC confines QA to what happens after a product is otherwise finished, not only is QA a bottleneck to product release, but QA is so distant from the product that scheduling or estimating QA becomes an exercise in speculation.
With QA fully integrated into the SDLC, you should begin to contribute from the earliest moments of product development. Participation in the first stages provides perspective on testability and schedule impact when decisions are the cheapest to make and pay off best. “Continuous QA” applied from the first days of development or enhancement lowers the risk that large, unpleasant surprises turn up only as a product nears release.
“Continuous QA” goes beyond just implementing Continuous Testing; you can more fully integrate QA in the full SDLC in a variety of ways. Set tests for various steps in your product release process itself to help integrate QA earlier in the SDLC. If you can, take part in requirements development and pair with developers for merge request review so that you can give QA input even before you’re able to get your hands on actual testable code.
Doing this keeps the partial product “green”–it passes pertinent tests–or nearly so, from the start. Product development is much easier for the development staff when the product always stays within a handful of corrections from the green state. It’s easier to remedy ten minor discrepancies at a time than wait until the end of product development and have to solve hundreds of interacting defects.
Everyone involved in product development has a more straightforward job when a product starts on a “green” path and returns to it swiftly after every misstep. We don’t insist that QA integrate fully into the SDLC to be nice to QA or somehow equitable. Instead, early integration makes the most of QA’s efforts, benefits the product, and reduces the load on everyone else involved.
If QA is siloed in your organization, it’s time to make a change. You can do so by looking for KPIs that reinforce the point that properly executed QA helps create more valuable products faster. Analyze your department’s existing culture, think about what decisions you’ll make to bring that culture closer to the one you want, and eliminate obstacles to “green.” Do these three things to build QA into your SDLC and see your product quality improve!
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