The common types of misalignment in QA

To diagnose the misalignments in QA team can efficient address the problems and opportunities effectively, that helps you to create momentum to stimulate QA work including your process or automation test development, among multiple agile teams. In another side, the misalignments could be a recipe for disaster especially in QA team, because in any case you cannot downgrade the QA work and lost product quality, to exchange a thorough team building or give a major overhaul. Thus we’d better to revisit it and reinvent it little by little.

In this article, I summarized some common types of misalignments in QA team, but I’m biased that the scenarios I mentioned may not fit to your case as I don’t work for all sectors in the markets.

I learnt it from the book “The first 90 days”, the chapter 6 — Achieve alignment, I wanna apply the cases to QA specific area, to constitute a solid vision about how to diagnose QA team and how to constitute it.

Misalignments between strategic direction and skills

In most of agile team, they may delivery the product every day, such as a web application, or every week, or every 3 weeks. In fast pace team, for example, a short agile lifecycle team with quick iterations, one of the strategic direction, in quality assurance sector, is to quick “check” and “test”(get the difference about check and test here) the new features, but do you already have the skills like design test case and execute validation faster? For example, check your skills match to following questions if your team target at fast iteration :

1. Ability to design clear test cases with necessary data preparation before or in the same time as development?
2. Skills to efficient and effectively execute the test case before dev click on merge button?
3. Ability to recognize what is a bug?
4. Repeat to execute with same manner in efficient way?

If one or several are out of your box, thinking about by what skill base in your team can target at the team strategic direction? And what’s your solution to shift the team skill base?

Misalignments between strategic direction and core process

Imagine the mission of the QA team is to focus on how to find bugs as much and early as possible, and to ensure the product quality in a fast iteration. If your QA team has not established an effective way to support the quality assurance process, but focus on how to setup a process to refactoring the code relentlessly that always come from automation test team, or pursue new technologies or design patterns indiscriminately, then it means you derailed from your initiatives. For example, check following questions:

1. Do we defined and documented a clear QA process with each team member’s responsibility in each stage? And how do team member communicate between the stage interfaces?
2. Does your defined process match to the agile team’s strategic direction and long-term vision of QA team?

If you answer No for both questions or either, then think about what you are working for and which part consumes your team players’ time? Are you already derailed? Your core process should support your strategic direction, and the strategic direction should drive the adaptions of your core process. Did you revisit your initiatives time by time?

Misalignments between structure and core process

Imagine your QA resources are organized by different product agile teams, each of them focuses specialized product knowledge on specific part only. As the result, the core process defined for targeting strategy direction would be adapted in different agile team, these variant decentralized unmanaged process(can be a good adaption, or worse) without thorough awareness among all QA team(even all Agile team) would lead the gap of the quality between of each team, and the rest of agile team players could get confused by misunderstanding, and we potentially build a barrier to share and absorb good practice, or point out the bad changes, even we lost credit as a whole.

Misalignments between structure and strategic direction

From assessment perspective, especially for automation QA team, we sometimes have a dysfunctional assessment system, that cannot balance your development work and QA work. You are a developer or you are a QA? For example, imagine a QA automation team uses how many lines they wrote, and how many project/services you provided as a key factor in self-assessment, but ignore the direct contribution to the strategic direction, as the result, the team would be derailed by this behaviour change. Keep in mind that, the development from QA Automation team is the mean, not the end. The assessment of QA, or especially QA automation team is to evaluate the end about how do you contribute to and impact the strategic direction. For example, a team can create a shared platform and a production-like test environment that everyone can write and execute tests to lead a quick agile iteration by a shared and dispersed QA responsibility, and a system to measure this platform, like which test cases find more bugs in which area, and which test cases never find bugs, to assess the Quality of the Product, and the quality assurance work cross functions and teams.

Misalignments between structure and skills

It happens quiet often in QA team when the structure has been shift, such as when your product team changed from waterfall to agile method, or your QA team shift from manual test first to automation test first. For example, when the QA team shift from manual-test-only to manual+automation test, this momentum in fact is generated by the strategic direction shift, like the team target to support new features to customer in fast iterations to provide excellent user experience. But does your original QA team members has enough training and skill base to fit to the new working environment and new introduced processes that cover automation checking and manual testing? Or they just keep them be isolated with ingrained working way and manner? When a team already in a realignment stage by a shift, people think they are success already in the past, but ignored emerging problems, and resist all the changes. What you need to do? How your leadership can influence them, and how the decision can make? Did the skills block the core process, then become a bottleneck to follow the strategy directions?

Those common misalignments in QA team are quiet obvious, even you get solution for each or you are not in any cases(I have to say you are really lucky enough). However, emphasized by the writer of The first 90 days, are you satisfied at firefighting invariably? Or you need to find the root cause and avoid that happen in the future? I prefer to setup an extra process which can be a small reinvention by every sprint to achieve alignments and monitor we are still not derailed. Never put yourself into quicksand(except you have to), if you have enough time and information to build process to achieve alignments, especially quiet critical in QA team, as it would influence the quality of the product , then to your customer experiences, and business.

In another hands, the alignments will help you to create QA momentum and build alliances with rest of agile team players. I don’t think you really want to send Xmas gifts to your neighbours when your own house start to burn down(The QA team internal even haven’t been aligned, how do you centralize the effort to give values to others, and create momentum by a virtuous cycle between QA team and rest players in agile team).

There is no one best way to solve these misalignments in QA team, at least until for now based on my knowledge. It depends on which stage your team in, what’s your political environment, and team culture and moral. Trying to think hard by yourself if one of case meet to your situation.