Role of QA in an Agile world
For most people, QA in the IT development world is someone clicking on buttons calling it testing, and following some predefined steps. But this would be a waste of QA potential on the project. QA has much more to offer and in the following paragraphs, I would like to highlight some areas where can QA help on a project on the top of manual testing.
Sure, it is all about your QA colleague skill, which you have on the project, and your willingness to invest time and money to train the person. It is also about the personal willingness to working on himself, but I would like to just highlight some areas where QA can help and in the end bring some other value to the project.
From a different point of view if you will let your QA colleague only do manual testing and just blindly follow some predefined steps then sooner or later it will become a boring routine for them at work. There will be no space for learning new things, self-realization, and this person will leave the company.
In Actum, we are trying to find new areas where QA can be involved. From new tools to be more involved more in the processes and different areas on projects. To bring the best value and quality as possible to the customers.
QA can participate in the analysis and definition of user stories especially with writing acceptance criteria, because they know how to make them human-readable or, thanks to their mindset, QA can help find holes in functionality logic coverage.
Another area where QA can help on the project is speeding up the development process mainly thanks to reducing time to testing solutions. By this, I mean different types of automated regression tests. On a large solution, it can take days or even more than a week to do a manual regression test before deployment and we can also cover the smoke test after deployment. With automated tests, it usually takes maximally a couple hours to test the solution. This time saving also opens time for QA to spend with other activities. Sure, automated tests also take some time to develop, but as the project continues the curve of spent time is not going up like when you are doing regression tests manually.
QA’s can prepare user documentation in written or video form, which is really useful for system end-users, future administrators, onboarding new team members, or future changes in the system. People are coming to and leaving companies. Without user documentation, after some time it can be really hard to use the system and can become a big pain. Not because the system is getting worse, but simply because knowledge of the system is leaving due to employee fluctuation.
Outside team, QA can also participate in training application users, future system administrators, content editors, etc., because they know the application the best due to their testing of all developed functionalities and using the system on a daily basis. So, they know all possible pathways on how to work with it.
In most cases, our application contains some content, and that is an area where QA can also help. If there are not tons of content and is not changed frequently, QA can replace the role of the content editor. As I mentioned QA is familiar with how the application works from testing. So, it is the most suited person to fill in the content. Although someone else should handle preparation.
From a management perspective, QA can help with leading meetings especially those related to testing, but that is not the only area where they can help the team. QA can set up quality metrics that can be interesting to the whole team and stakeholders like, for example, amount of defects by priority, by root cause, in time, closed defects in a sprint, new defects in the current sprint, from UAT, etc., to better understand where weaknesses of the development process are on the project or where the team is performing exceptionally. It only depends on agreement on what we would like to track on the project. With tools like JIRA, you have all the needed data. The tool needs to be set up properly and the data interpreted, processed correctly.
In the previous paragraph, we mentioned project tracking system and that is also an area where QA can help to set up properly from filters, attributes for defect item, a user story item to workflows for defects, user stories, and metrics.
Maybe you will be able to find some more areas where QA can participate in your project and that is great, on the other hand, I am not saying that the QA skill set is useful for every area of your project. In the end, all projects are different. This article wasn’t about coming up with all possibilities but to show that QA can be much more and can be involved in various activities on your project from which can benefit all involved sides including the customer, employer, and the person itself.
We are ACTUM Digital and this piece was written by Vlastimil Matějka, QA Team Leader of Apollo Division. Feel free to get in touch.
