Jani_Grönman

You don’t know what you know until you find out – Guide for doing QA Assessments

Session Speech

In our business, we often hear about our client’s QA problems. As QA professionals we are often tempted to think that we already know the answers to those problems. BUT: we might not know enough about the domain or the context to make correct judgements. This might lead to the use of “best practices” ie. copy pasting previous solutions.
In the speech I will present a structured way to get knowledge through interviews and workshops in order to co-create a tailored roadmap for improving quality in an organization. This model has been used time and time again and it has benefited the target organization in finding out their dormant capabilities, needs for improvement and also a “sales guide” for getting internal budget for changing practices for example.
We start with interviewing people in the target organization toroughly, including as many roles as possible, like developers, testers and other QA, product management, customer support, sales etc. This will provide us raw data of risks, pain points, opportunities, perceived quality from many perspectives.
Next step is to distill the raw data and find out emerging themes. We then select some of them and process them further in workshops. In these workshops we, together with target organization members, will dive deeper in the themes and start to ideate how to improve the situation.
Next phase is to once more process the data, both from interviews and workshops and form a breakdown of the findings, theme by theme and provide each with an improvement proposal. This is compiled into a final report, which is the main deliverable. With the report, target organization can plan for their improvements, apply for resources and schedule actions.