@mirza has just written a great article titled “Quality Coaching: A Road Less Traveled,” which focuses on the emerging role of a quality coach. This article explores how this role can significantly influence the culture of quality within teams and organizations, going beyond traditional testing roles.
In your experience, how do you see the role of a quality coach fitting into the current software testing landscape? What impacts could it have on team dynamics and overall software quality?
We’re eager to hear your thoughts and experiences, and encourage you to read the article for a deeper insight into this exciting role.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughs and opinions.
I haven’t experienced that, but it sounds like a great idea. I (a dev) would really benefit from a tester dropping by once in awhile, talking about testing and how I could do better. Love it!
Yes, I have - and I’m currently trying more to enable the delivery team than making me the only stop for everything testing. There’s no reason to be the bottleneck if you can build awareness and better flow by helping others (rather than creating dependence).
I love this. I have never heard of a Quality Coach as a distinct role, but it sounds like the way I’ve always envisioned real effective leadership in QA and testing departments. Ultimately, I’m doing my job if the team as a whole gets better! I don’t always know the answers, but I have different answers than you do, and I’d love to achieve some balance that can move us all forward.
As an important question… how does one seek out opportunities for this sort of role?
I’ve been curious about this role for a while, the first time I heard about it was from the AB testing podcast and from a blog article by @emna_ayadi.
From what I noticed there aren’t many jobs for the Quality Coach role, however, I noticed that people often suggest that this can also be an informal role or an activity done by a tester from the team.
To me, this seems like a dream job, where you get to promote quality, collaborate with others to improve testing and train others how to test better!
In your experience, how do you see the role of a quality coach fitting into the current software testing landscape?
I can see the test specialist in any cross-functional team - including very mature ones - naturally progressing into a quality coach / advocate / whathaveyou role as they start caring more and more about what goes into quality besides testing or how testing can mean more than isolated test activities late in the development cycle.
What impacts could it have on team dynamics and overall software quality?
More amicable and productive team dynamics, as testers and developers can no longer blame each other for sloppy work and become acutely aware of each other’s challenges. Better quality when this quality coach helps the team get faster feedback loops (including from customers) in place.
In my previous company I talked about this role in more detail:
There is also a danger, I have to add. A lot of the value of a quality coach is not (easily) measurable. You’d have to not just learn coaching skills, but unfortunately also go against the team focus by strongly marketing yourself and keep track of how the team performance is improved by what you do. We’re still missing something here.
That said, the people who act as quality coaches (while usually not having that title) are - to me and their other colleagues - so clearly a benefit to their teams.
I’ve carried the quality coach title for quite a while now and the article does resonate with a lot of the activities I cover.
For me though I have not viewed it as a full time role, I enjoy it but I also really enjoy testing, if I could get the balance to 25% coaching and 75% testing then that ideal in my context.
One of the biggest values I saw, was facilitating a lot more discussion around quality and then as a team using those discussions to guide the way we work.
With management I found they could relate better to quality focused discussions rather than testing focused discussions.
This was important because I have strong views that testers are not QA’s, the idea of a tester telling a developer they should do a code review and how to do a code review is a fools errand but as a quality coach I can help them choose their own good practices.
The dual role carries a bit of that risk, that the title infers ownership of quality which is far from the case, as a coach its a very supporting role. Your early discussions on the role an value are an opportunity to make that understanding and alignment on this very clear to remove that risk.
Avoid any command and control style, you are not their manager and doing so will create resistance that can put the team in a worse place than where they start despite best intentions.
A little late to join this thread but over the past 12 months I’ve been morphing into sort of a coach role. [Edit: 2 days after posting this I got an official new job title - Quality Coach!] I am certainly understanding the “buzz” around the role.
When we moved to scrum, I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of dedicated scrum masters other than the fact that it was a challenge when I was both a full time tester & part time scrum master. Even whilst I was a scrum master, I don’t think I got the entire value of the role. Now that we don’t have one, I get the value.
I think quality coaches are similar.
In particular in environments where you don’t have (m)any dedicated testers, having someone drive the conversations and focus, ensuring that teams are thinking about quality and testing from day one (not just “how do we implement this?”) is valuable.
As well as being a full time role, helping multiple teams, I can see it working well when you have dedicated test specialists within a scrum (or equivalent) team but testing is shared throughout the team. This would free up the testing specialist to spend the extra time going beyond what is on the board. In order to enable this to happen, we need to shed any notion that the developers in the team can’t test.
I love that. Im just taking on something of a similar role. Im viewing it like when we brought in agile coaches at a previous job. The engineering teams had been struggling with scrum agile for a while. It was a mess of (as one would expect) mini-waterfalls. These coaches really helped gently and relentlessly reinforce best practices until we gained the muscle memory to just do it.
