3 Lens Quality Assistance Model

Unlike Quality Assurance, Quality Assistance is a model where product engineers own the feature lifecycle from ideation to support. In this model, software testers enable teams to improve their quality rather than participate in uplifting quality.

Companies wishing to adopt this model will need to consider the impact of shifting to this approach, as it impacts beyond quality coaches to product teams and potentially to product engineering leadership.

In this article, I use a three-lens¹ model to understand what needs amending when a company shifts to a quality assistance approach.

The three lenses are:

• Organisational lens
  These are the structures and models required for the team to exist within the organisational construct.
• Squad/team/practice lens
  On a team level/squad/guild level how to interoperate with these structures
• Quality Coach lens
  Areas directly impacting a quality coach include their role, career paths, etc.

Frame what good looks like for quality assistance through all three lenses. By doing so, you are ensuring you have considered the impact of any changes through the eyes of a quality coach and the effect on the teams and the organisation.

There's a significant amount of context to consider when adopting any approach. The following are some questions to consider. You don't have to embrace all of these, but it's worth thinking them through with engineering leadership to understand what they feel is essential.

Organisation Structures

The essence of the quality assistance model is to shift ownership of quality to all of the product engineering instead of allocating it to one role. Not only do quality coaches have to adopt new ways of working, but the whole of product engineering does, too.

• Company Culture
  • What are the Company Values?
  • How big is the company? Maturity of Company (startup, scaleup, enterprise)
  • What is the size of the company?
• Current Company Structure
  • What is the current company structure? What other practices will you align with (delivery, SRE, engineering)? What might need modifying to accommodate the quality assistance model?
  • Do Quality professionals exist in teams? How will they transition?
  • Team Topologies: Are there stream-aligned teams? Enablement teams? Platform teams? What will you be? How will you structure product focus versus technical focus?
  • Enablement Team Structure
• Will you be solely a technical enablement team?
• Will you work in isolation with other enablement teams or collaborate with them?
• How will you maintain frameworks and tooling?
• How will teams access your frameworks and example tests?
• What technical tooling will you be delivering?
• Practice or Guild
  • Will you have a guild or a practice where quality coaches can assemble and learn from each other? Will they report to the quality practice, or will their manager be within a squad?
  • What is the aim of the practice? What is it accountable for?
• Operating models
  • How will you interact with feature teams? Will you wait for a request? Or will you perform audits and track progress?
  • What other practices will you collaborate with? Do you need an operating model for them?
  • How will the operating models impact roles and responsibilities?
• Roles & Responsibilities
  • Who is responsible for elements of quality?
  • What roles need modifying? Will software engineers need to have software testing included in their role? How will they transition those roles?
  • What impact does this have on career paths? Career Growth?
• Job Descriptions
  • What will the job descriptions look like? Will software engineering job descriptions include software testing? What other activities and tasks will they be taking on?
  • What HR considerations do you need to make when changing anyone's role?

Process

• Hiring Process
  • What will the hiring process look like for new engineers and quality coaches?
  • What will the hiring process look like for new engineers and quality coaches?
• Onboarding Process
  • What new information do quality coaches need during onboarding?
  • What do engineers need to learn about owning software testing? What tools do they need to be taught?
  • What self-service product knowledge can be made available to all new hires under the product?
• Transition Process
  • What is the current state? What will be the end state? What does success look like, and how will you track it?
• How will you get from the current state to the end state? (What's your strategy and roadmap?)
• What change management tasks do you need to ensure you do? Will you use the ADKAR change management model, or does the company have a method of handling change?
• Who is currently managing existing quality professionals? Who should manage them?

Interacting with Teams/Practices

Interpersonal considerations are the people and groups the quality assistance model interacts with. For example, Quality Coaches, Software Engineers, Engineering Leadership, Product Managers, Designers, Practice Leads

Consider the following questions:

Informed

• Who wants to know the state of the product's quality? How often should you catch up?
• How will you keep people informed? Through reports? Videos? How will you share success stories? Who will quality coaches report progress to? What information sessions will you need to hold?
• Who do you need to keep informed about the transition process? Who should be informed about quality improvements?
• Who needs to keep you informed? What do you want to be informed about?

Consulted

• who do you need to consult to develop structures and processes? Who will be impacted by the quality coach model? Who will want to have input into how quality operates? Who should you consult who has considerable influence?

Product Teams

• What product teams will you be working with? How many? Are they value stream teams or platform teams?
• What skills do software engineers have? Do they understand they are responsible for quality? What training will they need?
• Will you audit teams? Will you coach or direct? How will you decide how to interact with teams?
• Does the team have a whole-team approach to quality? If not, how do they manage quality? Is it working? What needs improving?
• Do the product teams know what success looks like? How will you begin coaching them on what good looks like?
• How will you split up quality ownership among teams? What are they responsible for? What are you responsible for? How will you go about working that out?
• How will you incorporate and involve product engineering in your decision-making?

Practices

• What practices will you be collaborating with? Engineering? SRE, Delivery? Security? How do you plan to work together? How can they build quality into their ways of working?
• How can you help other practices? What can you collaborate on? What can you learn from them?
• What tooling are they using? What ways of working, operating models and structures do they use?
• What skills do software engineers have? Do they understand they are responsible for quality? What training will they need?

Quality Coach Practice

Quality coaches may or may not sit within squads. Regardless, someone needs to consider the following:

Career Path

• What levels of quality coach will there be? How do you begin your career path? Where can it lead?
• What roles and levels can you compare a quality coach role to?
• Who within the organisation should you involve? HR, Engineering Leadership?
• Who will manage the quality coaches, engineering managers or the Director of quality engineering? What are the reporting lines?

Training Plan

• What training needs to be given to quality professionals to shift to the quality coach role?
• What training do the teams need?
• Who will do the training? Is it internal or external, or both?
• Do you need an additional budget for training? Who will provide that?

Job Descriptions

• What skill sets are required? Will you train up or hire in?
• What does the job description look like for each level of quality coach?
• Will there be a difference between a technical quality coach and a product quality coach? Will there be a different job description? How can quality coaches switch between the roles?

Quality Practice Structure

Will you have a quality practice or guild?

• What will the team structure look like?
• Who is responsible for what within the quality practice?
• What are you responsible for as opposed to the team responsible for? (Test Environments, test data, frameworks,
• How many quality coaches will you need? Now, and in the future?
• What are the hiring questions? Who will perform the interviews?
• What's your operating model? How will you interact with teams? How will you measure success?

Sensible Defaults for Quality

As a quality practice, it's a good idea to mock up what "good looks like" in these areas. Labelling these sensible defaults and asking for input from various stakeholders allows teams to modify them to their context.

• Product Quality End State
• Quality Attributes for product and/or a service
• Key risk areas for the company
• list of recommended tooling that quality practice supports
• test data strategy, test environment strategy, test automation strategy
• Company-Wide Quality Strategy
• required tooling for teams, for practice
• Quality Rituals & Practices you want teams to embrace. (Risk storming, Contract Testing etc.)
• Principles
  A list of principles the company believes about quality
  • Quality Principles. What are the company's quality principles? Will you create them, or will you facilitate the creation of the principles? Who should be involved?
  • Architecture & Engineering Principles. What engineering principles will impact quality? How will quality coaches contribute to the conversation?
  • What principles in product and design exist? How can you incorporate quality into them?

Request for Feedback

This is my first draft of such a structure. It's clear it needs some modifications. For example, the classifications can be improved. Feel free to enter feedback in the comments below or reach out to me at feedback@qualitycoach.io

¹ I first learned about the three-lens model from a class on strategic thinking by Lifelabslearning.