Quality engineering is about team members and their stakeholders taking joint responsibility to deliver IT solutions with the right quality at the right moment.
But how do these team members know what are the best activities to do?
And when to do them?
A quality engineering strategy will support in answering these questions!!
This blog shows you 3 ways to benefit from such strategy.
1) Clear Guidance on Activities to be Done by the Team
The quality engineering strategy is a further development of the well-known test strategy that describes the intensity of the testing activities and when to execute them. Creating a Test Strategy is a natural thing for testing professionals to identify where the emphasis of testing activities will be, usually based on the risk level (high risk means more testing, low risk means less testing).
But for today’s cross-functional teams to really work “risk-based” they should align not only testing tasks but all IT delivery activities. Therefore, the quality engineering strategy describes three main groups of quality measures.
- The first group are the quality measures aimed to build quality in (preventive).
- The second group are quality measures to gather information about the quality level (detective).
- And the third group are quality measures to improve the quality level (corrective).
By having these three kinds of quality measures the quality engineering strategy supports determining all activities needed for a team to deliver the right quality at the right moment.
2) Build Quality in from the Start (instead of testing it in at the end)
In traditional IT delivery approaches the responsibility for quality often was assigned to the testers, even though it has been known for decades that quality is not something that can be added at the end. By assigning the three groups of quality measures a cross-functional team ensures a focus on built-in quality from the very start of a project or release. All tasks that are performed by the team members contribute to a continuous focus on the creation / improvement of quality of the IT products to be created, and also on the improvement of the IT delivery processes and the people involved.
3) Well-balanced Choice of Quality Measures Ensures Appropriate Intensity to Align with Risk-levels.
Today’s high-performance quality engineering requires assigning tasks and activities in a well-balanced way to reflect the risk-levels. For high-risk areas of a system the quality measures applied must have a higher intensity than for low-risk areas. First the team discusses and determines the required intensity, and only when they agree on the intensity, they will assign an adequate quality measure (this two-step approach is valuable because there is a choice of literally dozens of quality measures, by first determining the intensity required, the choice becomes more easy).
Examples of the Three Groups of Quality Measures
There are dozens of quality measures. Examples of quality measures that are aimed to “build quality in” are pair programming and four amigos sessions (and there are many more). Static and Dynamic testing activities are examples of quality measures to supply information about the quality level. For improvement of the quality there are reactive activities such as bug-fixing, but also pro-active quality measures such as refactoring (to improve the quality of code even though it works fine as it is). Many more examples are listed in the available excel-template (see below).
Why would Teams want to Create a Quality Engineering Strategy?
The benefit of applying a quality engineering strategy is that a team (or even a group of collaborating teams) creates easy and clear guidance for everybody involved, about which activities to apply to achieve built-in quality in fit for purpose IT systems. This guidance will have differing focus, some quality measures are linked to individual user stories, other quality measures apply to features or epics and the quality engineering strategy will also contain generic quality measures that the team applies always.
Want to Know More?
You can find more information about the quality engineering strategy on the www.TMAP.net body of knowledge website and in section 26.7 of the TMAP book “Quality for DevOps teams”. The excel-template for creating your own quality engineering strategy can be downloaded freely from the TMAP website (in the downloads – templates section, under “performing templates”).
Good luck on balancing your quality engineering activities with a solid quality engineering strategy!
Rik Marselis is Principal quality consultant at Sogeti and chairman of the TMAP special interest group and has been Programme Chair of the EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference. The EuroSTAR Conference has been running since 1993 and is the largest testing event in Europe, welcoming 1000+ software testers and QA professionals every year. Check out this year’s EuroSTAR Conference programme and come together with the community in-person.
