Create a Quality Coach Job Description
For clarity, I'm going to use the term quality coach (QC), though in your world you may prefer Quality Advocate (QA), personally, I find that gets confused with Quality Assurance and often people default to that term.
Imagine you or your company has decided to transition to a Quality Assistance model, the one that has software developers owning their software testing. What does this new world look like? And what does this QC do? How will you know if a QC is doing a good or great job?
These are not easy questions to answer making it hard to create job descriptions. This is partly due to the newness of the role, but also QC tasks are difficult to quantify. They don't necessarily have concrete outputs in the form of artefacts. A Quality Coach focuses more on delivering outcomes, one being that a team is able to deliver quality features with minimal assistance. A heuristic for a successful quality coach? They're not needed by the team anymore.
Regardless, creating a job description is a useful exercise. It helps drive clarity in your thinking about the role and is a useful method to communicate how this role differs from a traditional software tester role.
The following is a process I used to help clarify the quality coach role.
A good QC Job Description builds on your company's values, your vision for quality plus input from existing team members.
Know your company values
Engineer your job description to give the QC and those around you the most likely chance of doing well. Before researching outside of your company, research within. What company values will influence the nature of this role? Think on how a QC will you demonstrate these values. Also, consider who needs to play a part in the JD process. I sought out HR and Engineering when creating the Job Description.
Existing Job Descriptions
If you copy from one book, that’s plagiarism; if you copy from many books, that’s research. – Prof. Notestein of the Yale faculty
Google to your heart's content. Find as many job descriptions as you can, job sites are good sources for this. Be discerning. Look for a variety of contrasting flavours of the role. Highlight what you like, and challenge yourself to be able to explain why you think that particular aspect is important, or why it's suitable for your company.
Testing Tasks Workshop
Run two workshops, one for software testers and the second for team representatives. Keeping the sessions separate, offers safety and permission to voice opinions without self-censorship.
Focus the workshop on identifying both current and future tasks. Break tasks into those within a flow of work, and those outside flow of work.
Testing Task Workshop
Participants: QA/Software Tester/Quality Engineers
Preparation Work:
Setup a board marked inflow of work and outside flow of work. (agree on what these terms mean). I use the flow of work to describe work performed from epic refinement to working in production. These terms are useful as a lot of tester work is outside the flow of work (and invisible to team members).
Workshop
Step 1: Ask the group to identify all the tasks they do now inside and outside the flow of work
Step 2: Offer an opportunity to discuss observations as a result of these two steps
Step 3: Rate these tasks according to 4 categories: Highly valued, valued, Minimum, and Avoid.
Step 4: Use Keep, Stop, Start tags to identify what tasks to keep, what tasks to stop plus what additional tasks a QC should start doing.
Hopefully, this will generate a lot of discussions. For example, we identified testers doing highly valued work that the team felt they should stop doing.
We also noticed that even though the workshops were separate, both the software tester's and the team representatives had similar ideas about what they considered valuable work.
This should give sufficient clarity around the accountability part of the quality coach job description.
Quality Coach Description
The model below provides how I see the core dimensions of the role which can be useful when brainstorming and putting the JD together.
Lite Version of Quality Coach Workshop
If I was to do this workshop again, I think I'd perform it this way:
Have everyone in one workshop. Identify all current quality-related activities (regardless of role). Use Keep, Stop, Start to identify new tasks you should be doing (Keep/Stop/Start implicitly places value on tasks). Finally identify in the new quality assistance model, who will do what task.
Let us know how you go!
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