What have I learnt the second half of this year?

In over 6 months I have turned the ship around and built out a Quality Engineering function. Moving from Quality Assurance (sat in the build stage waiting for things to come to us) to Quality Engineering (embedded in teams and involved throughout the delivery cycle).

Looking back it has been, well, tough in places. It requires an enormous amount of energy with lots of strategy in place. However, once I set the foundations, then it has become easier and smoother over time. There’s a lot more to do, but overall I’m proud of what I have achieved in that time.

I’d like to share some of the things that I did and learning that took place.

• Rebranded from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering. This signalled a change that we were going to be doing things differently going forward. I took ownership of the change.
• Created a Company QE Strategy: I set the direction to create a Company Quality Engineering Strategy. At the time there were two different strategies, a functional and non functional. We needed more focus.
• Brought my team along the journey. We created the Company Quality Engineering Strategy together. If we’re going to change, we needed to do it together.
• Create Template: I created a Test Plan and Test Summary template to help guide my team on what to think about (we call them QE Plans and QE Summary report). Google the one page test plan to create your own template. For the QE summary report— a brief note of what you did, issues you found and observations/learnings. You can expand it to whatever suits you. Short and concise is better than long winded reports. Stakeholders that you’re wanting attention from do not have a lot of time.
• Test automation: Start small with test automation — automate high priority business processes first. Expand from there. Do an automation feasibility study with the team and assess what adds value.
• New People: Hiring people and onboarding are paramount to success. Spending energy/time here will be worth it. Focus on your vision of Quality Engineering function and get people onboard that align with it.
• Test Management tool: A central place where you store your test evidence is crucial to success. It helps build confidence. Invest in a Test Management tool.
• Embedded into teams: Moving away from a separate team and being embedded into product teams is an efficiency gain. It will take time to be fully effective, but keep working on it.
• Broad scope: If scope is broad, discuss and focus on where the value add is.
• Move away from only testing the UI — expand slowly.
• There’s going to be aspirations of things you want to do, but haven’t got round to. We all have those. That’s OK.
• To turn around a poor perception of QE — be honest with the QE group around the poor perception, have tough conversations and give feedback.
• Listen to what your gut says and do what makes sense.
• As a QE Lead you’ll spend more time on setting the direction to start with. Later on when you’ve got that in place remain hands on. Get involved in testing the product. Along with read bug reports, test plans, test deisgns and summary reports.
• Peer review: To level up the quality of work, then get a peer review process in place. It will be paramount to success.

Overall I feel leadership in quality engineering/testing will make or break the function. Invest in hiring leaders in the field that can make the function effective.