My personal opinion is that we’ll see more organisations move towards having quality coaches, working one to many in engineering teams. That’ll likely mean that some of the more dedicated “doing” roles in testing will reduce in number, it’s unlikely that’ll happen quickly in industries like finance though.
This will likely mean we’ll see more need for testing generalists rather than specialists. People who can sell ideas of testing, talk confidently about different types of testing and roll their sleeves up and help engineers to implement testing. We’ll probably also see a lot more need for outreach and models that show engineers, CTOs and organisations the art of the possible when it comes to testing.
In order for quality coaching to be meaningful from an AI level, there’ll need to be a lot more data to train those AI on. We may see early AI tooling not being truly holistic or trusted and needing to be worked with alongside a quality coach, who will train the AI with organisational context.
Alan Page and Brent Jensen had this idea of quality coach as the future of coaching in their original Modern Testing Principles, which as I recall, they came out with in - 2017? 2018? In my last decade of working full time, I considered myself a test consultant. I did some hands-on testing, but most of my time was pairing or ensembling with non-testers, doing workshops for them on things like exploratory testing, suggesting new tools/techniques/practices to try to solve our problems.
I want to shout out Anne-Marie Charrett’s brand new book, The Quality Coach’s Handbook, I think it provides a ton of guidance for people already in this role or aspiring to move to a role like that.
I anticipate a big refutation from traditional teams just like some agilists refuted testers decades back.
Quality is a broad topic, and often confused with so called QA (Testing) team.
The real productivity and effects may be seen after an unfortunate dull phase of fantasy believing into AI and then getting trapped by the curses and syndromes of AI.
Another big challenges is that unless companies see good quality coaches in influential positions where they can bring and demonstrate change to them, many companies may stay confused about how to leverage quality coaches in real projects and not just restrict them to coaching or learning workshops.
I tend to see the coaching as another hat I wear, I like to be testing so the quality coaching with a decent bias towards the value of good testing at 20% of my time seems a good match, we are around the 100 developers size.
I am seeing movement more towards a holistic view of both quality and testing so whole team involved quality plans becoming more common alongside a level of testing facilitation when multiple teams, companies and integrations are involved.
The coaching can result in more developer testing often based on efficiency principles, AI may also help facilitate this further and when this happens the tester role can change. For example I see a lot of job adverts of testers covering things that are very suited to developer coverage and maybe those things are being made even easier for developers to cover, this could reduce the number of dedicated testers across the board.
I am an advocate of a low tester model where importantly the tester covers something that the developers do not cover so well themselves. This often manifests in a bias towards the unknown, performing deeper exploration and investigation of risks that whilst developers could do it would likely change their focus enough to slow their development down.
So more all round testing is generally the case but alongside the potential reduction in waste and duplication between roles.
This is very generalised but if the starting point is no testers I’d usually advocate for more testers, if its a lot of testers I’d usually advocate for more developer and designer testing and less testers overall.
The market still seems very heavy on testers doing what developers could do very well in my view though. I’d be interested to see other coaches view on this element.
I’ve worn a Quality Coach Hat in my previous and current place of work. Mainly coaching Engineering Managers, Project Managers, UX Designers, and Developers by providing them a general checklist and heuristics they can follow before they involve me. This helped me focus on business problems and use cases. In some cases, it was a necessity as I was the Sole tester in the team of 10-20 developers.
I think the growth of coaching roles depends on the company and region. In Singapore (where I’m based), I’ve seen a drop in testing roles recently, likely due to macroeconomic factors, layoffs, and reduced startup funding. A Quality Coach can help in such setups, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
AI will probably play a role, but it’s still early, as highlighted by @cakehurstryan; it’s only as good as the data it’s trained on. Maybe in the future we’ll see personalized feedback or team-level quality insights, but we’re not quite there yet.
Hi Ady, thanks for your question on this topic. I work as a quality coach for a major UK retailer so I will try and answer your questions in turn the way I see the role. I’ll caveat this by saying these are my personal observations and other coaches may have different opinions or observations:
Will the growth trend continue? - This IMO depends entirely on the industry that you work in as a quality coach and the economic situation of the country you are located in. Some traditional industries such as finance, banking and games development will continue to employ traditional testers/QA and other industries may choose to go the quality coach route. The key to whether a company hires a QC or not depends on how mature the engineering and product team are in your company.
Will AI tools play a role, and if so, what? Personalised feedback? Team analytics? - AI tools are no doubt going to play a role in the wider software engineering industry over the coming years. The problem with AI currently is that it’s very much in the experimental phase and the full impact of this on the industry is unknown. This topic could be a whole new thread in itself but to answer your question I think it’s going to be an idea generating tool for both developers and QA’s looking to improve the code bases and generate new test ideas.
As quality coaching grows, will testers and quality engineers numbers reduce - This will sound similar to the first question but I currently don’t see the QC role as a replacement for testers or QA’s. There will always be industries that need testers/QA’s for either manual, automation, exploratory and other traditional testing activities. The Quality coach role may expand in the industry as other companies look to shift testing left and try to build in quality from the very outset of a project.
As testers are moving to quality engineers (80% of testers identify as QEs). Is the next step quality coaches or something different? - One shift that the entire industry does seem to be making is making QA more of an overall team quality perspective rather than an individual activity of one person. I see testers/QA’s becoming more of a generalist such as tester, Product Owner, BA, designer, marketer etc. The more we understand of the entire business holistically the better we can improve the products for out customers.
I’m happy to clarify any points raised here as there is plenty of advice I can give to people who aspire to be a Quality Coach
I agree with @cakehurstryan , in my organisation the need in quality coaching is growing at pace. I get worried about seeing developers take requirements and see where they can get with an AI agent before reviewing the output, refactoring it etc . We have to get ahead of that and to do that we will be spending more time in “prevention” and less time in testing. We need to intervene in the requirements even ideation to coach the product teams and developers into understanding in our collective context what good quality looks like, commit to it as a unit and work to influence further.
So as Callum said, I see the generalists being more comfortable filling that space and rising to that challenge.
As a quality coach I’d definitely second this. Our quality director not only bought us a copy but also our managers as there was difficulty for people to understand our purpose.
On AI, as a QC I’m starting to explore it more and more. One of my recent interesting uses was feeding it loads of data from RCAs then linking it to our bugs in Jira and asking it to summarise our challenges (having spent time combing through this data already). It reached very similar conclusions.
I see a bulk of my role being understanding our challenges and guiding teams through it. The coaching aspect to guide teams is nuanced to the human beings and not where I’d use AI… But spending ages analysing data… That is where AI can come in.
Last week I switched from our cyber champion program to AI champion program as I believe AI can be the way forward in highlighting challenges then that human element of a quality coach can help us solve them.
