How can we teach teams to build quality into the systems?

(prakriti) #1

I work in a big organisation with multiple products and multiple teams across locations. We have been facing this problem of disparity where some teams are great at understanding the value of QA and embrace it from the beginning and others who have never worked with “build QA into the product” mentality or even worked with a QA before.

Some teams have reached out wanting to learn more about testing and how they can improve the quality of their products - now the question is do you all know specific trainings that might help? Or material that we can explore to build a custom workshop for these teams?

(Joe) #2

Hello @praqriti!

Great question! This is especially challenging in a large organization. A while back we established a Testing Methodology that provided information on testing throughout the product development life cycle. At the time, it was a culture change and it required a few years to be adopted everywhere.
I advocate for quality as a team sport by meeting with the development lead. I explore ideas around design/code reviews (testers can participate!), and unit tests. For example, testers can look for testability during design and code reviews, or the unit tests could be used to demonstrate requirements (this frees up testers for more interesting work).
Something else I use is Three Amigos meeting to help build rapport and explore who does what.

Hope that is a start!

Joe

(Jesper) #3

hi @praqriti,

Exploring the Modern Testing Principles might be a path too:

(prakriti) #4

Thanks for bringing this one up! These are very close to the principles that we want to attain in the org - my struggle is that reading a document might be too little to be able to propagate this msg effectively. I was hoping some of you might have attended workshops/ coaching sessions etc that I might be able to learn and replicate from :slight_smile:

(prakriti) #5

Thanks Joe, going to start coming up with the methodology around what works for us in the org first and then relentlessly keep making small steps towards achieving this with things you mentioned :slight_smile:

(Bjoern Welchering) #6

Dear @praqriti
we face the same problem within our org.
From my point of view, you need to define the “lowest bar” the teams have to reach. Additionally you could act as some kind of QA Consulting and show, how you can help the teams.
We have defined a maturity index, that will cover the “lowest” bar, as well as future developments.
Another idea is the implementation of a QA Guild to streamline the knowledge across all QA people.
Please feel free to contact me in case you have any more questions.
Bjoern

(prakriti) #7

Like your idea of having the lowest bar set up first. Since I posted this, decided to start with doing a workshop with teams to understand what is their definition of quality, hope that will give me some data on where to begin and how to improve. I am curious about the maturity index. Going to ping you to learn more about it!