I’ve spent the last 4 blog posts discussing how everyone except the QA team owns quality so, to cap this series off, lets discuss what role the QA team has in the delivery of a quality product… because it’s an important one.
The QA Team
As I stated in the opening of this series you are here to accurately measure the status of customer quality regularly in a repeatable fashion throughout the development cycle. The words here are critically important.
- Test Plan pass fail reports. When tests are executed do the pass or fail. If they fail why do they fail?
- Known Bug counts by severity. All products ship with bugs so it’s not just important to know how many there are… but at what severity the known issues are throughout the cycle so that the team can fix what’s most important first. The point is to make sure people are aware of the bugs.
- Code Complexity – If you are shipping software you need to be able to communicate where it’s complex and look to reduce complexity BEFORE it’s developed in the first place by reviewing development plans, tickets, or user stories. You should push back on requirements that will make the product untestable and unnecessarily complex.
- Test Counts VS tests remaining – Everything needs to have coverage… this really measures your work backlog.
As a bonus – nothing beats a few good rounds of ad-hoc testing by creative people trying to break things.
Ok, this concludes this 5 part series on product quality. It’s obviously something I’m pretty passionate about and I hope you enjoyed it. If you are digging back for the first 4 posts in this series to see how other roles own quality.. here they are:
- Part 1: Sales and Development
- Part 2: Consulting and Support
- Part 3: Marketing and User Experience
- Part 4: PMs and Leadership