Morning All, Hoping you’re ready for a (what should be) sunny weekend.
I have a question for people about feature “sign off” (a term I hate) from the development perspective.
Thinking about the basic SDLC flow of Dev > Test > Release
Do you typically see testers “signing off” unilaterally on something as tested and ready to release?
Or, if not then who gets involved in this process? Who ultimately is the decider? How do you build this into the process.
would you for example have a tester do a Show and tell with the Devs and BA/PO/PM (whoever) and go through what they have tested? Do you do this on everything or just certain things etc.
I wrote something related to this a while ago when we were having a similar discussion at work.
My view is that testers should take accountability and responsibility for their work and create visibility around it, but should not be “signing off” on quality in general or for specific features. That is a business decision. Testers play a role in providing information/intelligence to that business decision.
One of the top voices in testing Michael Bolton said that testers are there to provide an analysis of where a software stands, the risks, the good and the bad. It is then up to the people with decision making power to actually decide whether to release or not.
And I think this makes perfect sense. What if the tester blocks a release demanding a certain bug be fixed but the product owner would decide otherwise? In such a case who did the sign off, PO or tester?
It also works in reverse in that a tester might think something is “good enough” when the PO doesn’t.
I’ve got many examples of this over the years where (often offshore) testers have stuck exclusively to the AC when determining something as done, and then someone might come in an highlight some perhaps cosmetic issues , or perhaps even realise some AC were missing etc.
Nope never, I let all the PO’s of my teams sign off since they are Owner of the Product
They work together with the testers to bring quality to the product. So the team together decides if the product is ready for release and then the PO signs off.
Quality is a teams responsibility and not just the tester.
I am aligned with what has been said above. I see QA being an advisory role, it is the product owner/business stakeholder etc/ who will take the QA findings and decide whether to proceed, obviously taking other factors into account like business readiness etc.
I always push back when being asked to “sign off” testing because:
We provide the status and position of the system under test (a statement of fact).
We provide the details of the coverage.
The pass/failures/descoped etc…
Details of the outstanding defects (priority, expected resolution).
It is up to the project team, business team, or product owners to determine if it is ‘good enough’ to go live.
I have found that getting the test team to sign off testing can be used as a finger pointing excuse by others if problems occur in production “You signed off the testing why is happening”.
Yes we can have exit criteria, but that is often at a to high level at the time of writing.
Yes we also provide reports., but that is a statement of fact not that everything is great and good to go.
