How a QA inflight meeting can boost your project’s success
When I’m working on a significant product development initiative, I want to know that my team is all on the same page about the progress of our development.
To help with this, I like to call a mid-project meeting of the minds called the Quality Assurance (QA) Inflight Stakeholder meeting. This serves as a health check on our project: 1) are stakeholders in agreement about the progress of the implementation thus far, and 2) have we done the appropriate knowledge sharing so that everyone can do their job?
As a QA’er, these questions are especially important to me as I get closer to the main testing push. If we don’t have all of our ducks in a row yet (missing use case, UX isn’t quite what we had imagined), this could mean costly re-work and re-testing down the line.
This article will walk through the core principles of the QA Inflight Stakeholder meeting, how it can benefit your development projects, and provide example discussion questions to get you started.
What is a QA Inflight Stakeholder meeting?
As the name suggests, there are a few key features:
- QA — The project (or a large portion of it) is just about ready for QA testing. If the group can spot large and/or obvious issues, they can be fixed early and prevent double-testing. This meeting is also a handoff to make sure QA has the appropriate background information and scope of testing to complete their work.
- Inflight — The project is in a demo-able state, meaning enough progress has been made to see the design come to life. The team should be comfortable triaging any changes suggested in the meeting, and there should still be time and resources available to make important updates.
- Stakeholder — The meeting should involve anyone who is critical in shaping the project and/or has important background information to share. This can include developers, QA’ers, product owners, project managers, customer support, regulatory, etc. You want diversity of perspectives to help scrutinize all aspects of the implementation. With everyone in the same room or video chat, the team can efficiently discuss resolutions or next steps with the key decision makers.
A note: Ideally, project teams communicate frequently and thoroughly over the course of the project; most of the components of a QA Inflight Stakeholder meeting are conversations and decisions that I hope to have as early as possible. However, a lot can happen from the moment a design is first approved to when that project gets fully implemented. Depending on the length and complexity of a project, it can be helpful to have this touchbase to summarize the incremental changes that have been made along the way, as well as fully onboard newer team members.
Getting started
This meeting is highly adaptable to the needs of your project. Here are a few best practices to get you started:
Setting goals
This meeting works best when there are clear goals for the discussion. Your attendees will have better engagement if they can prepare for specific discussion points. There can be more than one meeting goal. For example, a recent meeting of mine had three:
- Confirm the implementation matches the new customer expectations for user enrollment
- Compare the user experience across three different user types
- Share learnings from similar projects regarding test cases and environment configuration
Live demo
A live demo allows everyone to see the current implementation in action and experience it as a user would. Typically, the lead developer will walk through the main workflows, use cases, and user types of the project. If applicable, the demo is prepared with realistic data in order to best represent what it will look like once it is released. Showing a live demo allows the attendees to make note of screen transitions, performance times, button clicks, and other interactions which are difficult to convey through screenshots or flow diagrams.
Discussion
The discussion following the live demo should fit the goals of the meeting. However, there a few generally applicable questions which can help move the conversation along:
- Does this match what we had in mind when we wrote the design?
- Does anything look immediately “off?”
- What is the piece that is most likely to break/cause bugs?
- Are we forgetting any large details, workflows, or use cases?
- Do our testing records accurately reflect real-world configurations?
- What follow-ups are needed before we are ready to ship this project?
Try it out
Interested in holding a QA Inflight Stakeholder meeting for your next development project? For small projects, this could be a quick chat between Dev and QA. For larger projects, you may have a full agenda you want to cover.
With either, help get your fellow attendees excited about constructively critiquing and collaborating on your project at this key point in the implementation. Having a touchbase (in whatever form you choose), is a win for your project and a win for your collective understanding of the project.
