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QA on Tour: Insights from the Future of Quality Assurance
The tour started in Oslo where Cecilie Johansen from Gjensidige and our own Mats Bøhn joined us and presented how Itera has helped Gjensidige improve the quality of their app.
From Oslo, the tour went on to Reykjavik, with over 50 attendees! The last stop was Bergen, where Oksana Bogza from Instech joined us and shared how Instech has worked with consultants from Itera’s offices in Central- and Eastern Europe, with great success. The whole tour was led by Galyna Baranets, Fredrik Sjursæther and Ada Jordal.
Top takeaways from the seminars
The main topic focus for this tour was on the future of QA and how all of us working within QA as well as in business need to change to become more quality oriented. We covered three main topics, which we we will summarise in the following sections.
Topic 1:
Business assurance - quality as a business driver
“Business assurance” is about raising your test and QA work to meet long-term business goals and plans. It is an enabler for teams to connect to the organisation’s visions and targets and to make the work performed in the teams directly applicable to the business strategy.
We used an “Effort, Output, Outcome and Impact” flow diagram to visualise the concept. “Effort” is the work that project teams in the organisation do every day. “Effort” produces “Output”, which can be applications or services. When “Output” is launched to the end users, it becomes what we label as “Outcome”.
We do test and run quality assurance activities in all these stages successfully today. The new area for testing, which we see is becoming increasingly important, is to perform quality assurance on business strategy and initiatives. This is the phase called “Impact”. The quality work performed in this stage is what we call “Business assurance”.
A key recommendation is to connect the quality assurance work from the teams in the Effort stage up through Output and Outcome to the Impact from the Business Strategy and Initiatives. Doing this, we believe that not only will be better quality work done, but the teams will also become more motivated and responsible working towards reaching your company’s business goals and drivers.
Topic 2:
AI enables QA to focus on high-value tasks, while automating repetitive tasks
AI is great at helping us get started with the quality work, be it to deliver a template for a test strategy or to help write test-cases based on screenshots, links, or requirements. However, where AI is a really strong help is within test automation. A report published earlier this year states that although we have talked about test automation for 30 years, the average test automation coverage is only 27% for all systems.
There might be many reasons for this, like the cost and competence needed to start with test automation and the capacity needed to maintain your scripts. However, this is an area where AI can really bring value! Hence, our recommendation is to consider to let a robot initiate your work on implementing test automation. What is better than having a robot fix your test suite that is no longer running because of some small change in the frontend?
AI is a great tool to help with repetitive tasks, so that we can pivot our focus more on the complex tasks that gives higher customer value. But we can’t just throw AI at everything, we need to have a smart approach.
Topic 3:
How distributed teams can improve quality and the QA process
Distributed teams can improve the QA process by leveraging high competence from a global talent pool. In addition to strong expertise, distributed teams will enhance flexibility and scalability, bring diversity into the project, and reduce overhead expenses. Having nearshore resources in distributed teams is a way to go for delivering quality results and fostering strong relationships across geographical borders.
Here are some key advice on how distributed teams can ensure quality of the process:
-> Establish clear and close collaboration. This helps to keep everyone aligned and fosters collaboration and communication
-> Setup a transparent process organisation. This provides visibility into the process, allows team members to collaborate effectively and keep stakeholders informed about project progress and the quality of the system
-> Define clear QA processes. This ensures consistency across the distributed team and reduces misunderstandings.
-> Set up test management. This establishes a robust test management system to organise test cases, track progress, and manage test artifacts efficiently.
-> Set up knowledge sharing sessions to share QA best practices, tools, and techniques. This helps to improve the overall QA competency of the team.
-> Implement automation testing and AI wherever possible. This streamlines the QA process and improves efficiency.
Summary
So after two weeks and three fabulous events in Oslo, Reykjavik, and Bergen, many fun and interesting conversations, we are left with a feeling of encouragement. We have experienced that quality is a topic of great interest and something people really do prioritise. We want to thank everyone who joined our events and showed enthusiasm and inspired us by asking many challenging questions.
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