BA + QA: The Power Couple
For one of the latest big changes in our client’s application I was thrown in one hour before releasing the new feature into production. The change was relatively straight forward, an update to the look and feel of the Order History page of the final customer.
This was the first time me and some coworkers were looking the feature. Since we were not familiar with the feature, soon questions started to be raised: What happens if an order has a product that is no longer available in the site? If I open an order in page 3 and go back, it should go back to page 3? Each page of the history has different recommendations? What happens if an item was returned? And so on.
Frequently the answer to these questions was “I don’t know, let me ask the developer”. And then the developer would say “I don’t know, it is not clear in the story”.
I find this situation to be a problem because if a change was needed, we were less than an hour away from releasing to production. Because at this point is too expensive to add a change to the feature, the easiest way to handle the changes is to open a ticket and to be prioritized with the rest of the things to change and make it to a daily release. I think this can be worked out if the process changes.
BA and QA working together
Sometimes BA and QA get to get to work closely together. I have found that dynamic truly powerful. In past projects in which I closely collaborated with the BA, he would be in charge of investigating and documenting what the business expect from the application. Then me as a QA reviewing the stories for questions would ask any doubts and details that might not be considered in the first iteration of a story draft.
Maybe, after one or two iterations the story would be so clear that the developer would have all clarity in what is expected, and once the feature is developed the QA is so familiar with the feature that she/he already knows what is expected and the time it takes to verify a story gets shorten.
At the end, the goal is to deliver the feature with good quality and quality starts from the moment the feature goes from an idea to a story.
