QA strategy

Motivation

Goal of the QA strategy is to support the product and delivery quality of both functional and non-functional requirements, ensuring the customer's satisfaction with the product.

Keep in mind, that fast functionality delivery with no quality attributes will eat the business for dinner in the post-startup stages of the product due to an accumulated functional and technical debt, slowing down the product growth dramatically.

QA strategy content

1. Define the KPIs reflecting the desired balance between product delivery velocity and quality. If going too much for velocity and fast feature release, the quality suffers. If being obsessed too much with quality, the delivery velocity is slown down.

   Testing KPIs examples

   • Change Failure Rate % - proportion of failed releases
   • Reviewed Requirements - This KPI is to make sure that any requirement that the testing and development team is working on has been reviewed by the subject matter expert and is good to go.
   • Incidents: Amount of 2nd and 3rd level support issues
   • Bugs to Features ratio % trend
   • Testing automation: Pipelines stability, Code coverage, Tests Executuion time

2. Identify components severity On the scale 1-3, define the components that are low priority, normal, or critical priority to run the business. Define the quality minimum for each severity level.

3. Adopt your testing priority by components severity

4. Workforce allocation: Decide the required QA allocation:

   • Ensure there is 1 QA Engineer per team.
   • Ensure there is a platform team/representative taking care of QA devops.

5. QA Talent management

   • create a strong learning environment for QA Engineers
   • Reduce the number of manual testers by moving them to automation
   • Create hiring pipelines, if necessary

6. Tooling: have a clear tooling and platform supporting the test scenarios ant automation

7. Final: Construct the QA strategy roadmap and the required budget as a timeline of initiatives to improve and sustain the product quality.

Additional sources and templates

Quality Minimum.pdf

QA Acceptance Criteria.pdf

QA Guidelines.pdf

GitHub.pdf

QA Process.pdf