Building a strong quality focused organization: A top-down approach
Several change management professionals have suggested that the Bottom Up Change Management Strategy is more effective than the Top Down Change Management Strategy. That may not always be the case when it comes to applying a quality-focused approach to product development in a business.
Top-down approach to quality-focused development life cycle
Embracing Quality Leadership
Separating quality engineering responsibilities from other engineering aspects like as development, DevOps, and management would be extremely beneficial in the following ways:
- High Visibility among the QA Functions and processes.
- Time and space for Quality Teams to build their own supporting softwares / automation tools and perform any R&D needed.
- Better management of budget (better allocation to QA Teams)
- Improved Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)
Push towards automation
Automation Quality Assurance is just one part of the complete STLC, but it is also the most important factor contributing to your overall test engineering practices.
There are few things a test engineering leader can do to engage automation engineering practice in an organization:
- Invest time to research necessary tools, frameworks and technologies for their need.
- Urge for a budget allocation to hire necessary resources (with needed skills) and for any other licensed tools.
- Collabrate with various organizations on how their tool works, and if we as an organization can leverage it to the fullest.
- Invest time in research and integration of QA Functions in existing CI/D pipeline.
- Decide upon various platforms to support (Web, Mobile, TV).
- Prioritize and put a plan to design and develop automation framework along with test plans and test scenarios.
Spread awareness about Testing
Unit tests should be included in the acceptance criteria (of a ticket/epic) for developers. An organization should embrace test-driven development to the fullest keeping in mind the bigger goal.
Before releasing a feature, the engineering, product, or quality assurance leader should prioritize and identify the platforms that cannot be launched without full e2e testing.
This can include API e2e testing, user interface testing, performance testing, security testing, and for some, integration testing. Many organizations use more than one platform, and some cannot function without testing all of them. It is entirely dependent on your domain, budget, team expertise, timeframe, and a variety of other criteria.
Start small. Start Slow. But Star
Don’t settle for less. Don’t push embracing quality processes any longer. That perfect time will never come. You always won’t have enough budget, enough time, enough (skilled) resources, or even strength to build QA e2e processes.
If you start now, just with one platform (say web), and just one feature (say sign-in), just begin, start building your automation framework, start writing happy and sad path testing, learn your UI architecture, learn more about development experience from developers, management experience from managers, and product experience (less bugs, a better UX etc).
It’s very important to improve upon processes after the review.
Prioritize improving processes over tools & technologies
Attend Conferences — Stay updated!
We have to accept that appium and selenium are the leading open-source frameworks for automating mobile and web respectively.
To stay up to date with latest features and updates, make sure your quality engineers attend conferences held locally or workshops conducted by Quality Leaders.
The most famous conferences for QA are:
- Selenium Conference — https://seleniumconf.com/
- Appium Conference — https://appiumconf.com/
Building Quality processes and integrating them with your current practices is hard. It will cost you time, money and resources. But it will yield to less bugs, an intuitive user experience for your application and a better SDLC. As a leader, take up the challenge, and preach for quality process.
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