In this episode Federico and Matthew narrate their experience of how having unclear expectations can lead down a path that can eventually create a culture of treating QA as a burden. It is a series of event that we call the vicious cycle of QA. Federico has been on the team for almost eight years and today shares his observations of how the team got itself into an undesired place, what were the symptoms, and what our decisions created. Look for a future podcast to learn what actions we took to break this cycle and move forward.
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Vicious cycle of QA
- In a nutshell: unclear expectations leads to blame which leads to more process which leads to bottle necks which leads to more unmet expectations.
- Step 1: Unclear expectations
- QA, PM and Dev do not have a clear understanding of what is the role of the testers. What can they expect from them, and more importantly, what are the limits of their responsibility.
- Having unclear expectations means that every person on the team has a different idea of what are testers supposed to do. Even higher level managers.
- Step 2: Fail and get blamed
- Without having clear conditions of success, what may turn out is that each miss is considered a failure.
- Since the responsibility is not clearly defined, it is easy to have the QA team be the focus of blame.
- Step 3: Cover your back with processes.
- The QA team may turn to create processes as a means to cover their backs and transfer responsibility to the rest of the team.
- Many processes are created that gives security that as long as they are followed, the QA team can shield behind them.
- Step 4: Push back when process doesn't fit the plan.
- With so many processes and checklist across the board, the QA team may become the bottle neck of the development cycle.
- Since processes have to be guarded, QA team starts to push back on new features due to lack of time to properly do testing.
- Turf wars may begin between the several disciplines.
- Repeat:
- Push and pull eventually settles into a set of constraints that QA is unable to meet given the high cost of test process.
- More unmet expectations ensue.
- Culture of QA as a burden
- Since the processes where created to cover ones back instead of doing smarter testing, the perceived value of QA is still low.
- Eventually the perception and reputation of the QA team is that of a high cost and low value.
- How do we break out of this cycle? How do we turn around the team and perception? This and more questions will be addressed in a future podcast
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