Back in the exciting internet startup days of the late ‘90s, Lisa had the title of “Quality Boss” at the travel website startup where she worked. She held the keys to production. She decided when the release candidate was good enough to release and deployed to production herself. Looking back, she finds both the title and the idea that she felt like she owned quality truly terrible. Sometimes the new changes to the product exactly matched the requirements documents, and there were no critical bugs. However, the delivery team failed to notice what was missing. For example, important quality attributes such as load time meant customers didn’t value the new features because a page took too long to load.
It is a bit of a rush to think you have that kind of power, but in reality, testers do not have the full picture. We agree with the Modern Testing Principle #5 that says our customers are the best judge of product quality based on user needs*. Our teams can use today’s monitoring, analytics and observability technology to learn exactly how people use our product in production. We can use that data to pinpoint what would be the most valuable change or addition we can deliver next.
In our experience, testers add value by helping business stakeholders think about the problems they want the software product to solve and how best to make that happen. When testers are involved with early design brainstorming meetings and ask good questions, the value added is uncovering hidden assumptions. Techniques like story mapping, impact mapping help to identify the next change to deliver, and example mapping helps to get shared understanding of a feature.
Testers can collaborate with the whole team to guide development with business-facing tests. As coding proceeds, team members / testers can complete testing activities such as exploratory testing and test automation, and use continuous integration and deployment pipelines to get fast feedback. Our teams can take advantage of modern techniques like release feature toggles to hide or limit exposure of new changes until we are confident in their quality.
Testers add value by helping the team and stakeholders identify the most important quality attributes, and can help the team to make sure those attributes are built in. We can apply our customer perspective, user personas, and give feedback.
That said, the customers are not the product’s only stakeholders.
When it’s time to make Go/No Go decisions, testers and their teams can provide their input about risks and tell the testing story. They can even express a confidence level with a percentage. What testers should NOT do, is act as the gatekeeper who makes the deployment decisions. So, if you find yourself in that position, tell the team that is not your job - that the whole team owns quality and can make the recommendation together (if the need is there). In the end, the person/people who should make the decision are the business partners who understand the big picture and can make informed decisions based on the input from the team (including testers).
*Note: you can read more on Janet’s thoughts on quality in her four-part blog post on testing and quality.