A journey to instil the QA mindset

In the summer of 2019, I joined a PropTech startup as the QA Lead and was tasked with setting up QA from scratch.?One of my goals is to instil a QA mindset in my developers. Sounds like a great goal right, but what does it actually mean?

Over my career, one thing I’ve learned is that in order to be successful in achieving your goals you need to figure out how to measure the goal’s success. I’ve learned the first step in the key to success is determining how to measure success. How do I even begin to measure that I am successful in instilling a QA mindset? I’m not sure I have a full comprehensive answer just yet, but I have observed a shift in the questions my developers are asking as a result of bringing an awareness to the team around testing, and asking thought provoking questions as they relate to testing.?I have also seen noticeable changes in their behaviour around testing. Here is what I have noticed:

1. No testing on hotfixes, worth the risk?

Initially when I joined the team there was no formal process around what gets tested and what doesn’t. Through organic discussions in retrospectives etc… we ended up deciding as a team hotfixes were critical fixes and could bypass testing and be deployed immediately. However, there have been occasions where things are fixed and the developer asks me should I go ahead and deploy this? My response is often “if it’s a hotfix mark it as such and go ahead, I wash my hands of testing this” casually smiling and looking over at the dev. Recently upon saying this the developer changed his mind and said “Actually let’s do testing on this before we deploy it...It’s not really a hotfix that needs to be deployed right away.”??

This told me that the dev understood the value of having another set of eyes look over what they have done and is on his way to developing a QA Mindset.

2. Developer sending his own ticket back to dev

Recently a developer and I paired together to test a feature. The developer drove the testing efforts and talked me through what he was doing and how he was testing. As he started testing the feature he asked some fantastic questions for clarification on how the feature is meant to work and if the behaviour he is seeing is right. After discussion over the points at hand it was the developer himself who ended up saying?“this ticket needs more work; let me put it back in ‘develop’ status and work on it a bit more.”

A developer critically looking at his own work and being able to say “this isn’t good enough”sounds like a QA mindset to me!

3. Dev driving for a MOB testing session

We were getting close to completing the automation of a fairly manual business process within our application and development was wrapping up. I underestimated the organisation and didn't think the dev team was quite ready for a MOB testing session yet. However, in this instance the developer approached me, the product manager, and a fellow developer and asked if we could all get together and run through the testing of this feature together as a group. I was elated with joy on hearing this and we ended up holding a MOB testing session and went through all the critical path scenarios as a group to ensure we had met the acceptance criteria and that we were confident in the feature going to production and delighting our customers. This also gave me the chance to introduce the concept of MOB testing and the value had already been inherently demonstrated.

Developers seeing the value and asking for MOB testing sessions is something I think most QA’s dream of, but once you get there I believe it's reasonable to say your developers are thinking testing. If not, then item 4 below should hit the nail on the head

4. Testing, our teams superpower!

Recently, when I came back from holiday, I reviewed the PostIts on the board from a retrospective session that took place while I was away. Listed under a column titled superpowers was a PostIt note that said, “Testing, Testing, Testing!” I’m the sole QA on this particular dev team and I was on holiday when the retro took place, so it’s safe to say that a non QA team member put that PostIt up on the board.?

I read that PostIt note and just smiled!?

Have I instilled a QA mindset in my developers?

The answer is maybe. Is a QA mindset something you instil once and can say you are done? Probably not. However, I believe that the team is well on its way to adopting a QA mindset and I know this because I have heard discussions around testing happening. I have seen developers reworking tickets after finding issues themselves and I have seen developers initiating MOB testing sessions with my own eyes! This is at least a good first chapter in the journey to instil a QA Mindset in my developers and one that will continue well into the future.

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Authored by:?@SufyanFarooqi