What is a Quality Coach?
Defining the term quality coach and explaining this role in software engineering in contemporary organisations
Defining the term quality coach and explaining this role in software engineering in contemporary organisations
There have been many articles on the nature of the role. Alister Scott wrote about quality advocates I think way back in 2013. My favourite article to date is from Divya Konnur gave an excellent overview in her article "As a quality advocate"
This post focuses on the definition and the nature of the role.
Definition of Quality Coach
A quality coach guides, supports and rallys a team to collectively own and improve quality through facilitation, education, experimentation and visualisation. They are a passionate advocate for quality.
I wrote this definition back in 2017, and I like how it evokes a sense of team ownership, explains key techniques to handle uncertainty and change within a system plus the emphasis on providing information through the concept of visualisation.
What a Quality Coach does
In my previous book post, I wrote about how you could go about defining the role of a quality coach. This post is the explainer to that model.
Download the Quality Coach Descriptor
You can download a full version of the pdf below with complementary examples
Skills & Traits
There are many more skills and traits required for a quality coach. Here are some key ones.
| Skills & Traits | Examples |
|---|---|
| Risk Identification | Being able to identify key risks (technical & business) within a product and feature |
| Critical Thinking | What do we mean by X? How do we know it's X? Does it matter? |
| Systems Thinking | do I patch over a bug or discover its root cause? do I increase test coverage or invest in improving code quality? |
| Listening | Am I performing active listening? Am I providing space for people to be heard? |
| Empathy | How would I feel in this situation? What would help me? Allowing voices to be heard, Being the voice of the customer |
| Collaborative | Who needs to be in the room? Who needs to be involved in decision making? |
| Resilience | Developing tools and strategies to manage conflict and uncertainty |
| Learning to say No |
There's more to the quality coach model than tasks and traits though. To be a quality coach requires a different viewpoint. For one, there's a mindset of collective ownership of quality over being the expert in quality. The infographic below displays examples of how the role differs compared to a test lead.
Using the Quality Coach Model
The idea of creating this model is to generate discussion. It's not intended to be followed blindly.
Instead, take the model and use it with a pinch of salt. Don't try and do all these tasks, or expect a quality coach to be able to somehow instantly be able to perform all these tasks. Instead, take the model and interrogate it. Does this model suit our needs? What do we like and can appropriate? What should we drop? What is missing that we need to add?
Enjoy and tell us how you go! - Anne-Marie
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