Effective messages from the QA guild
One of the challenges we are facing since the Quality Assistance guild started at Mercadona Tech was establishing a profitable communication strategy with the rest of the team. Remember that we set aside of the squads, supporting them from a cross-team position. This post is about the different approaches we have tried to get our messages across.
The start
In the beginning, the problem was actually to decide what to say: we needed some data to talk about. Without it, we wouldn’t go too far in a data-driven organisation such as Mercadona. Nowadays we have a growing and constantly improved QA dataset but we had to start this journey with a very basic table of incidents. (Mental note: we should write something about our dataset!).
Our CTO gave us soon a slot in the Engineering Monthly Meeting, a forum where all of us can freely speak about any topic and get donettes (little chocolate-covered doughnuts) if someone is grateful to you. These are amazing occasions to grab everyone’s attention but when 90% of your speech is about incidents, you are very likely to be seen as a sort of Internal Affairs Officer 👮🏻♂️, especially if the format or the content of your message are not appropriate.
Besides, as other teams were doing, we tried a one-page Monthly Digest that described our work and achievements during the previous month. This quickly evolved to a series of slides called Incidents Digest that stayed with us until we had something else to show. For a long time, we had incidents for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and postmortems replaced novels before going to bed.
As the time passed by, we started to show some nice breakdowns (for instance, technical reasons behind the incidents, false alarms received…).
In an attempt to make this attractive for the engineers, we selected some of the incidents and put them into a highlights section with a link to the postmortems.
The recurrence issue
Once we established a format that helped us keep going month-on-month, everything looked good and teams loved this routine where they had a brief summary of what happened during on-call shifts, how the stats were going and so on. Or… didn’t they? 🤔
Our amazing slides with breakdowns and puns to gain the engineers’ interest on postmortems were not so cool as we thought, and positive feedback plunged with every new release. Luckily (rather intentionally), we had something new to show!
Our current communication
As the organisation grows, the amount of information, charts and reports that daily get into the different Slack channels makes that our messages have to be concise, accurate and relevant, as well as easy to read and interpret. Of course, there are dashboards aside were all the data is available, but our messages have to be like bullets: small, quick and precise.
When it comes to written messages, we came up with this new format (it might be old next year!):
Apart from the new layout, the introduced new information we are generating for the teams: different aggregations of software delivery performance metrics, volume of inputs from our logistics platform or any other interesting fact we want to point out for that particular month.
Also, we send a monthly filtered dashboard for every squad: an effort to providing them with a 1-click access to their portion of the dataset.
Additionally, we keep our slot in the Engineering Monthly Meeting, but now we can use it differently. As an example, we choose a recent incident and someone else makes the story-telling to the team, focusing on learnings and preventive actions. We still give some numbers on how the on-call shifts went during the previous weeks but not as deeply as we used to.
Conclusion
We are in a constantly evolving environment, where innovation is the only way to survive. This applies to our communication strategy too. If we want to be influencers, we need our messages to be like bullets, aligning content with format and avoiding the routine-killing effect.
