QA, Quality Assurance
Introduction
Hello everyone! I hope you had a wonderful work week, and I wish you a restful weekend. This week a colleague and I were talking about the role of QA. We’re trying to figure out internal processes and how we want to tackle gaps that we see in our current approach. She opened my eyes to new possibilities for the role of QA, and it blew my mind! I want to share pieces of knowledge from that conversation with all of you.
QA or Quality Assurance has been one of my favourite teams working at software companies. I think it is one of the most underappreciated teams and processes. The importance of QA is immeasurable, and I think it is time to change that perspective.
Scoping out the work and Requirements Gathering
Back in the day, when I was working for companies that hadn’t adopted an Agile Methodology, one of the main things I used to ask for while gathering requirements was, “What are the outcomes you’re expecting from this feature?”. I would not only compile the list of wants but the expected outcomes. We called these test cases. It’s an extensive list of inputs and expected outputs. It might not be a complete list of all the scenarios that might happen, but it was a large enough list that we would know what the expectations were. The list served as acceptance criteria for the feature.
In the Agile world, I’ve seen that QAs have taken the role to ask these questions. QAs actively participate with developers to ask for the acceptance criteria from the product managers. They help estimate the effort of delivery and testing and determine what the definition of done means for each specific feature.
Development
In the development process, QAs should be helping the developers with the tests they write for their code. Not actively creating those tests, but making sure that the written tests make sense and are aligned to the primary goal.
When working as an advisor in projects, I have seen that the development team sometimes doesn’t test their work and sends it over to QA. Occasionally, it’s at the end of the sprint, and it’s too late to…
