Tag: leadership

leadership, quality, Testing

Defining your Story – Owning Your Quality Narrative

Following up from my previous post, I thought it would be a good idea to dive deeper into the idea of the Quality Narrative. As mentioned in that blog, I first came across the term from the ‘Leading Quality’ book by Ronald Cummings-John (@ronaldcj) and Owais Peer (@owaispeer). The book is a great reference for helping to drive quality in an organisation and it has truly become my go-to reference book to understand how to move forward when you hit those roadblocks to improving processes around testing and quality. Here is Ron and Owais’ definition of a Quality Narrative:

A quality narrative is the way people think and talk about quality in a company.

Sounds simple enough, but when you think about it, there are so many parts to decompose. Let me try and do that now and show you how I use this…

Quality

What does quality mean for you and the immediate test/delivery teams? Is this the same view of quality that the wider business has. Quality is very context specific, in some, it could be measured by the number of defects outstanding against a release, each one having an impact on overall Quality, others it could be more about the user’s satisfaction of the system. Here is the definition I drive to and share with my teams:

The measure of whether the software meets the explicit and implicit needs of the customer and their ability to use it successfully

Simon Prior 2020

Having a definition for quality which everyone can agree on and work with, can really help trigger the understanding of where and how Quality fits within an organisation.

People

People would effectively be anyone who you may be trying to pursuade on the importance of quality.

This might seem obvious, but you can split people into different areas of influence and each will have a slightly more removed view of what quality is and how important it is.

  1. You and the test team – You are trying to help drive the culture towards a better focus on quality. To you, it is your main focus.
  2. Your Delivery Team/Department – Quality will be one of the main focus points, not the only one.
  3. Your Organisation – The further removed from quality being the main focus, the less attention given to issues. This is when it starts to become important to be able to map quality to what is important for the company. How does bad quality relate to revenue?

Company

Relating back to the people, the company could mean any level, but ultimately, it should relate to the overall view of quality across the whole organisation.

To the outside world, your company may not talk about quality, until something goes wrong. When it does, quality quickly comes to the forefront because it is then something tangible, whereas good quality doesn’t always have something so visible.

So How Do I Define our Narrative?

So you have an idea of what you are trying to define, the next step would be to start with understanding what the current Quality Narrative is. Start by asking questions to key personnel within every level mentioned above. Ask them about their understanding of Quality, the importance of it, where they believe it fits and how we can improve the quality of our products. You will likely get very different answers for each person you talk to, unless Quality is embedded within the culture already.

This may take time to build up, so don’t expect to be able to get this defined instantly. Once you have pulled this information together, think about the format of defining it. This could be a single slide in a deck or even better, a mindmap. Don’t make it too complicated, keep it succinct and straight to the point on. I would suggest breaking it down to the main 3 areas:

Perceived Quality OwnershipQA Department
Quality FocusAny discussions around quality start at end of development phase
Value of QualityRegulatory Requirement and purely confirmation testing (Checking requirements fulfilled)
A very brief example of an “As-Is” Quality Narrative

This should give you an understanding of where you are now, the next step would be to look at where you might want to get to. Understand there will be a journey to get there, but it’s a good time to collaborate with key people again to understand where they would like to focus on quality to be. Quality ultimately doesn’t just mean executing tests, there is far more to ensure the quality is good, everything from ensuring requirements meet what the customer is asking for, all the way through to the right monitoring/observability tools used in production to give feedback effectively and enable the product to be improved based on real usage. Tools such as MetroRetro or Miro can be a great tool (especially during these remote working times) to get people collaborating on this from wherever they are. Bring the key people together, brainstorm the ideas and collaboratively build out a future vision of where you may want to get to. This is then the first step on that journey. Then the hard work starts in moving the culture forward.

Management

The “No Desk” Experiment – Working Closer With My Team

Ever since becoming a manager, my motto has always been “People before Projects”, meaning that ultimately, if I provided my team everything they need, then the project work would take care of itself.

Working for a big corporation which has a lot of moving parts, meant that for a while, I was consistently in 6 hours plus of meetings per day, each one believed to be the most important by it’s respective organiser. It got to the point where the only time I would read emails would be in the evening after the kids had gone to bed, and as for having time to spend with my team, well apart from my scheduled 1-1s, there was very little. Sure I would stop by their desks and try and check they were ok in between my meetings, but I felt I was failing them as a team. So i decided to try and change my days in the office.

Firstly, I made the assessment on the meetings I HAD to attend, compared to the ones I wasn’t compulsory for and could either decline or pass on to one of my team to attend instead. This in itself, cut my meetings down to an average of 4 hrs per day which can still be a bit overwhelming some days, but is certainly more manageable.

The next step was, how do I give more to my team, at least now in the period where I have two junior new starters? Firstly I changed my 1-1 structure, I left my laptop at my desk, took a notepad and pen and asked them how they were, how I could help them and tried to show support for what they needed. The problem with taking a laptop was that if emails fly in during the meetings, it was easy to get distracted.

Secondly, I came up with a drastic solution, which I trialed for a week. Whenever not in meetings, I decided I would literally hot-desk around the Development and QA team members, meaning I would spend time sat with the team, understand the projects in more detail and offer assistance in any way I could.

This meant I could start doing what I’d been trying to get around to before bureaucracy got in the way and that was coach my team members and use snippets of the years of knowledge I had to share. If one of my team was putting together a Test Plan or Test Scenarios, I was able to review them while sat with them, rather than them sending it to me via email and my thoughts being sent back maybe a couple of days later.

I was able to respond straight away to any concerns, we could go for coffee and discuss the issue as soon as they came to me, rather than me telling them I’d get back to them when I was free.

I felt more aware of the day to day project work and the technical difficulties the team may be experiencing, I was hearing it all first hand, rather than through chinese whispers by the time it reached me.

I was worried the team would respond negatively to me being around, maybe see me as “checking up” on them or trying to micro-manage, but the response I got from the team was hugely positive. Mainly because I was more plugged into the day-to-day work, they were able to start conversations on that level, rather than bringing me up to speed first before getting to the point.

I took them all out for lunch that week too and it all just added to the point I was trying to make with the whole week, I value them all and I want to ensure I give them all the tools and time they need to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

While the obvious solution is to try and engineer a desk in the middle of the team, that isn’t immediately possible, but what is possible is to find every moment I can to be available for them. That still means I have work to do and emails to read, but it’s about being organised enough to allow the time while you are all in the office together, to be as around as they need from me. The team will grow and develop and in the same way children become more independent from their parents,  the team will grow and become self sufficient, then the job of coaching them will take a back seat and the focus for me can then switch. But while they need me, I will continue trying to make myself free for any time they want from me.