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| QA Strategy part 2 - Q.U.E.S.T |
In Part 1 of my musings on a QA Strategy, I described my new assignment, with a QA team added to my direct reports. Since I had never had to lead and manage such a team before, I set out to craft a QA Strategy document, both for my team and ideally to be adopted by the whole company.
I wrote of my possible pillars and the process of distilling them down into a more concise and workable set.
As a reminder, I emerged with these five general principles to guide my QA decisions:
(1) Quality is a shared responsibility
(2) All quality activities should produce information that is measurable, visible, and actionable
(3) Automate repetitive verification; use people for exploration and critical thinking
(4) Test according to business and technical risk
(5) Learn from production and feed those lessons back into development
My whimsical streak emerged at this point. These guiding principles are fine, but can I shape them into a fun acronym to help them stick in my brain and the brain of the team?
Here, I turned to some of the AI tools at my disposal. One of their strengths is helping in brainstorming ideas; another is is using their large language model to apply imaginative rewording. (Full disclosure - if you cannot already tell, the graphic at the top of this article is also AI-generated because its art skills exceed mine by a long way!)
(more about the options)
My favourite - QUEST
For my first draft of a QA Strategy document, I settled on the acronym QUEST, to capture and define our Quest for Quality. The acronym's slight rewording of the five principles:
Q - Quality is a shared responsibility
U - Use evidence to guide quality decisions
E - Explore with people; automate repeatable verification
S - Scale testing according to business and technical risk
T - Turn production insights into continuous improvement
I like it best for a few reasons. First, it puts Quality front and centre as the first item. Next, it uses a series of strong and active verbs. The word QUEST itself also communicates the mindset that quality is not a destination but an ongoing process of continuous improvement.
It feels positive, memorable, and aligned with where I think my QA team needs to move.
It is not perfect, though, and I may continue to play with the acronym and exact wording of the five principles in future revisions. My biggest complaint about it is that some of the most important key words are buried within a phrase - the acronym gives me the verbs but there is still some ambiguity about which pillar is attached to which verb.
The "Use" verb being the most problematic - the key thought of that pillar is evidence-based decision-making but "Use" is so generic that it could be with other ideas, like "Use automation on repeatable tests and people to explore and expand".
A Close Second - CARE
My original eight pillars or principles were trimmed and merged and rewritten as five. But if I take that process a little further and condense them to four, I could create the acronym CARE, like this:
Collaborate - Quality is a shared responsibility
Assess - Test according to business and technical risk
Reveal - Quality should be measurable, visible, and actionable.
Evolve - Learn continuously from production.
I really like this one for its strong one-word concepts, verbs that tie directly to the acronym and the central principles that will guide my strategy and its implementation. The result is much more memorable than the wordier QUEST.
But I ultimately passed on this idea because I felt the five final pillars could not be condensed into four, leaving me with two A's. My QA team really needs to lean into Automation of test processes and procedures, and Automation, in the above formulation gets lost.
Automation is either left out altogether, as written above, or it gets force-merged into one of the remaining four.
So CARE is rejected. While strong and very memorable, it is missing a critical element of where our QA team needs to go.
Option 3 - TRUST
I want the acronym to have at least a passing connection to concepts of Quality. QUEST and CARE above are fine, but TRUST has a stronger, more direct connection to quality assurance. After all, one of the reasons our QA team and processes exist is to create trust in our software.
Whereas QUEST was active-verb sentences and CARE was a set of strong single words, this acronym was created only through breaking the neat parallelism of the previous two. That makes it weaker right away, in my opinion. And the pair of T's is also problematic. For your interest:
T - Transparency through measurable evidence - concepts of visibility and data-driven decisions
R - Risk-focused testing - effort decisions will be based on where it provides the greatest value
U - Understand quality as a shared responsibility - everyone contributes to quality
S - Strengthen quality through automation and exploration - Automate what machines do well. Use people where judgement is required.
T - Turn production learning into continuous improvement
With two T's and a separation between some of the key words and the acronym itself (e.g. the Shared Responsibility concept is buried behind "Understand"), this one is weaker than I want.
Option 4 - SMART
This acronym drifts a little farther from the word having a direct-ish connection to Quality Assurance. But it does align nicely with our company's move toward more emphasis on evidence-based and data-driven engineering and corporate decisions.
S - Shared ownership
M - Measure quality objectively
A - Automate repeatable verification
R - Risk-based testing
T - Turn feedback into improvement
Automation, Shared responsibility (or ownership as reworded here), possibly objectively Measurable inputs. For these three, there is a strong single-word connection to one of my five pillars. And the T, Turn feedback into improvement, is in several others.
But it did not really stand out to me. SMART sounds too generic as an acronym choice, and some of the rewordings feel incomplete. Perhaps with some more whiteboarding this might persuade me, but in my original set, this felt weak.
Q.U.E.S.T.
I ultimately settled on QUEST as my acronym and used it in drafting my QA Strategy doc and spinning out the procedures, practices, changes and decision frameworks.
QUEST feels very natural for a QA team because testing is about the continual quest for confidence and correctness. To review:
Q - Quality is a shared responsibility
It goes beyond the QA team. Everyone involved in designing, building, testing, and supporting the product contributes to its quality.
U - Use evidence to guide quality decisions
Quality decisions are driven by measurable, visible, and actionable information.
E - Explore with people; automate repeatable verification
Automation is a powerful and necessary approach to efficiently verify expected behaviour; people are needed in our processes to investigate risk, usability, and the unexpected.
S - Scale testing according to business and technical risk
Testing effort should be proportional to the impact and likelihood of failure.
T - Turn production insights into continuous improvement
Production incidents, customer feedback, and operational metrics should continuously improve both the product and the development process.