I wasn’t able to attend the recent Testing Planet Episode 10: Exploring Quality Coaching, but in our latest TWIT (This Week in Testing) discussion, Quality Coaching and its value came up as a key topic.
I’d love to hear your thoughts—what do you think are the key factors that influence management’s belief that Quality Coaching is essential for both individual growth and overall team development? What are some practical tips or even experience reports for bringing such awareness to an organisation management?
Quality Coaching plays a vital role, however for management to fully recognize its important, several key factors come into play like :
Improved Delivery speed, enhanced customer satisfaction or reduced defects.
Aligning with Organization Goals like Agile Transformation/DevOps implementation.
Quality should be shared as a responsibility across teams, not just a testing phase activity,
Organizations that invest in coaching often experience higher employee engagement, improved skills and reduced project costs.
I came across an old article which provides insightful perspectives on the significance of Quality Coaching and its challenges in Organizations, it’s definitely worth a read!
Hey @ansha_batra thanks for reply on this. Some helpful considerations around it. How did you get buy-in from those in a management position to see the need for the role?
That’s a great follow up-thanks for asking.
It was not an overnight thing honestly, start with small wins-like pair with someone on a testing approach led to faster feedback or better test coverage, then share those outcomes in sprint reviews, just to make value visible without calling it COACHING outright
Over time, position coaching more and more as a way to scale quality thinking across the team-not just fixing bugs but enabling others to ask the right question early on framing it in terms if business impact like reduce rework or smooth release.
I’m afraid there is no such thing as a key factor in this context. Of course, in any company different levels of management and usually you can talt to low-kevel managers and they understand or can understand your argument regarding QA, quality engineering and even qual;ity coaching, but unfortunatelly, in many situation they can initiate any strategic transformations (if we don’t speak about smal companies) in upper levels of management quite often don’t understand QA for them it’s just Testing, the formal end phase of development. So there is no general advice. If they don’t understand QA stuff, they likely won’t, even if you have concrete numbers (if you talk to them from the position of an engineer)
I would say that Organisational Learning is the key factor. For quality coaching to be successful, the organisation must want to learn. Chris Argyris defined organisational learning as “learning from error.”
