Creating a Culture of Quality…

…instead of just hiring a QA team.

Inclusive Agile can help you evaluate what to do, and who to hire to improve your overall software quality.

What follows is a short narrative of how I’ve seen this play out again and again. The punchline of the story is that hiring a Quality Assurance team will not do anything to improve software quality if you are not willing to look at the entire system and mature the overall quality culture of your company.

A quality culture transformation requires an agile transformation. You can’t have one without the other.

This can easily be a 7 figure mistake in the first year of hiring a QA team and it’s possible that you may not need to hire any additional staff to improve your quality today.

Our Tale of Woe -

Really Cool Company LLC. hires software engineers to build a widget.

After some early successes, and maybe even a few paying customers, the team adds more features.

Then, they integrate with one or more 3rd parties to handle even more awesomeness. Fairly quickly, there is too much complexity for these extremely talented software engineers to keep track of it all. Bugs happen. Dates slip.

Customers get annoyed, then frustrated, then angry.

Our intrepid engineers do their best to keep up with new enhancements and bug-fixes but they spend most of their time just verifying that they didn’t break the increasingly large code base and features.

Leadership gets annoyed, then frustrated, then angry. 

Why is this taking so long? Why can’t we get clean releases out reliably? Why are we paying our super expensive developers to run manual tests over and over again? We’re wasting hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of dollars! 

This can’t continue.

Leadership decides this means they need to hire specialists to reduce the testing load from development and find the errors before they get to the customers. 

It sounds like a logical next step, so a Quality Assurance or Quality Engineering (QE/QA) team is hired. 

Leadership hopes these specialists can come in fix the software quality issues they are facing.

The starry-eyed test engineers show up ready to test and create awesome automation. The developers breathe a sigh of relief and with gusto start throwing code “over the wall” for the testing team to catch.

We’re finally moving again! Development rejoices, leadership rejoices.

The customers do not rejoice.

Each release seems to take much longer now and it seems just as many bugs are making it to production.

Wait what? — I thought our problem was that we were diverting our developers to testing tasks and not testing throuroughly enough. Why didn’t this fix it?

Software quality did not improve because all we did was add people to tell us what was broken, instead of addressing the systemic issues that cause poor software to begin with. A quality culture transformation requires an agile transformation. You can’t have one without the other.