How much do you agree with this statement?
Testers are responsible for continuous quality.
- Strongly agree
- Somewhat agree
- Somewhat disagree
- Strongly disagree
0
voters
Bonus points for hot takes!
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Is this questions meant exclusively? Like “just testers”?
Does “disagree” means I mean “not only” or “others but tester”?
In general I just can give here an answer once I understand what CQ is about.
How can you ask this question when the MoT course is happening 2 weeks? I do not see a shared understanding nor much information around.
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My thoughts have gone back and forth on this topic a few times and I can see reason for arguments on both side of the fence.
I’ve been involved in fully empowered agile teams as a tester. Business level OKR’s guided the team to choose their own level OKR’s even to the extent the team chose features to add, A/B experiments to run to the extent that we owned the product as a team. With that level of team ownership I felt we did own quality as a team and yes I was a responsible part of that.
In most cases I rarely see that level of team ownership, someone else is making the decisions often because they have more business impact understanding and here the quality decisions move out of the testers hands so not responsible. This is often quite rightly not responsible, testers telling developers how to do better code reviews and write better code is a fools errand in most cases.
In other cases I’ve been semi-independent tester on teams, my job is quality investigation, insight and evaluation in those cases. I don’t directly change or control quality but my findings generally influence it so not directly responsible.
The one other case gets a bit greyer, I dual or multi hat often so I can take Quality planning and management tasks in addition to my testing responsibilities. In the former I have more quality responsibility than most testers including continuous improvement, in the latter hat I’m back to more evaluation.
There are downsides to others thinking testers own and are responsible for quality but similarly without deeper discussion and understanding from others if you take the closer to reality stance of not responsible you may get a lot of confused looks from others. Whatever stance you go for, make sure your team and stakeholders understand your stance.
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They might be responsible in some teams, companies, roles, of parts of this ‘Continuous quality’:
test environment setup, package deployments on test environments, some automated frameworks/checks, scripts for analyzing production system logs
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depends on your compensation @rosie
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Quality is everyone’s responsibilities. It’s been a big change in my organization that I’ve been spear heading. It used to be a “I don’t have a Q in my name so it’s not my responsibility” but now, we actually have entire dev teams when they go work in an area, if it’s not tested thoroughly, they’ll voice they need a couple days extension on work so they can create tests before they start making changes.
Because of this, code quality has gone up, testers can focus on what’s important and the dev teams have much higher confidence in changes and feature rollouts. So I think it’s everyone’s responsibility. If you want a person to be accountable for it. Then I’d say the Quality People should be accountable and help drive it and advocate for it but they’re not necessarily responsible for enacting on it. if that makes sense.
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Testers do not control all the factors that create quality so can not be responsible for ‘continuous quality’: Who is responsible for quality? Is it the tester, or the team? – TestAndAnalysis
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Continuous Quality is not a term I’ve heard so it seems unfair that I should be responsible for it, perhaps like ‘quality’, I can be partially responsible (maybe every other weekend)?
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I really wanted to be able to select an ‘agree’ option, but I find the question to be able to be interpreted in so many different ways. Whilst I believe that testers often have the skillset to influence and drive continuous quality within a cross functional team, I dont think they can be considered as responsible for it.
Having said that, if everyone is responsible for something, then invariably nobody actually takes responsibility. I would therefore conclude this by saying that there are many ‘testers’ out there who are driven by a passion for quality, and their skillsets often will suit being able to lead on subjects such as continuous quality.
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Testers - Partially (As still only perceived as the end bit)
Quality Engineers - More So, Provocation of others & Responsible for updating the Framework that defines Quality
Its all about the branding and empowerment
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