CxO levels, be ready to take some tough calls this year!
If you wish to take your organization to the next level, empower your QA team. With agile becoming more and more ubiquitous, QA team would occupy more of a centrestage in the coming years. The traction and attention your business gets in the market would depend on- What is your attitude towards quality in the digital era? And what role does your QA team play in the entire value chain in driving digital transformation? Do you put the horse before the cart?
The numbers say it all.
Glassdoor just released its 50 Best Jobs In America 2017 list, and QA Manager ranked number 22. At Saguna, this ranking doesn’t surprise us. In fact, we see a lot of potential for this role to become even more coveted in the coming years.
Now, the question arises, how do we empower the QA team?
Do not micro manage:
When agile and Devops walked in, micromanagement walked out of the door. Micromanagement is akin to tortoise in the game and it represents a role-based rather than a project-based mindset. Most importantly, it doesn’t allow people to come together creatively.
So, time to let go of all the minute details and trust your team. This feeling is something that managers switching from waterfall to agile struggle with often and they enter into a portmanteau- Wagile.
Therefore, empower your QA team to take their own decisions. They should be able to tell you- “ The app is not ready to go live, it shows a snag on IE”. or “ The whole sale transfer of one language to another would not contribute to the scalability of the application”.
And, trust me, it would not lead to egomaniacal overconfidence…
Invest in full stack QA:
Quality is essential for our products and business, and many organizations underestimate the value of QA. In theory, QA should be involved in the project development lifecycle right from the start, but in practice, it doesn’t happen often enough. A full-stack QA team which grows and enables full-stack QA engineers, will help make it happen.
Put simply: #loveQA. For you to make it to Glassdoor rankings and beyond…
Birds of a feather…
When it comes to QA it is always better that they work in pairs. Knowledge transfer via pair testing is one of the most efficient way to train new members and maintain agile team velocity, assuming your team has senior testers or developers who are willing to share their knowledge and time with new team members. Pair testing is similar to pair programming, which is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. In pair testing, two team members work together at one keyboard to test the software application. One does the testing and the other analyzes or reviews the testing. This can be done between a tester and a developer or a business analyst or between two testers with both participants taking turns at driving the keyboard. Pairing is useful in breaking down communication barriers between developers and testers and creating interdependence between people in functional silos– thus building strong workplace alliances.
Birds of a feather, will always flock together…
Less is more:
When it comes to testing, less is more. Over testing does not lead to better testing. Instead, empower your QA team to frame test cases in a manner that maximises coverage and minimises duplication. This can be done by just focussing on the critical path and also proofreading the test cases. The tests can be modular test suites that can be integrated into the developer’s workflow.
Therefore, if you wish to escalate your business, involve QA in the centrestage.
That’s how a Facebook and a Google is made…
Isn’t it?
