Chief Quality Officer

In an earlier article I talked about the importance of getting to know what your marketing people are telling customers, so you have a better grasp of requirements from a customer’s perspective.

Now, you can sit down with the sales and marketing people and ask them what they tell customers (which is a good idea), but why don’t you take it a step further and actually be there for a product demo? You can have a sales person pitch to you directly at your office, pretending you’re a customer. Or, you can tag along on a sales call as a “technical rep” who can answer questions beyond the scope of the sales team.

You’re likely to hear a few things in the demo - both from the sales rep as well as from the customer - that will help you better understand what your product is really expected to do.

Leave your comments below … and until next time, keep adding (measurable) value, wherever you are.

- Dave Navarro, CQO

‘Been reading some good stuff lately on requirements gathering. Some of these tips, tactics and techniques you already know, but I’ll bet there’s plenty that are all “aha” for you. So if you’re interested in creative ways to give your requirements gathering process a boost, check out these great articles …

• Ten Requirement Gathering Techniques
• Undreamt Requirements
• 6 Tips To Double Your Requirements Interview Effectiveness

Keep it cranking,

Dave Navarro, CQO

Scenario: “Go find the requirements for this project you’ve never seen before. Oh yeah, they’ve never been formally laid out. No handholding!”

What do you do when you’re asked to gather requirements and you have no guidance? Since it happens a lot (more often in small companies than large ones), you gotta do some legwork. Let’s talk about how it’s going to have to happen.
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Scenario: “You’re our new QA manager. We have no QA process. Sink or Swim!”

If you’ve just been hired to start/run a QA department, there are a billion things to do. But there are a few things you should put at the top of your list (and perhaps even cover these before you accept the position). Meet with management/boss/powers-that-be and ask these three questions:

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You: “I’ve got a kick-*** test plan!”
Management: “Prove it.”
Engineering: “Prove it.”
Customers: “Prove it.”

A test plan ain’t a test plan until you can prove it does the job. And that’s where a traceability matrix comes into play. It’s the magical bridge that links what everybody says the product has to have/do/be and what you, my little QA ninja, actually test for.

A good requirements traceability matrix (RTM, from now on) not only helps everyone sleep better at night, knowing that a QA team with superpowers is saving the day, but it can also save your important little butt in the process. Here’s how to make that happen.
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The CQO. It’s what you are - like it or not - whether you asked for it or not.

Just like the Chief Operating Officer keeps the company chugging along, just like the CEO (presumably) sets the company’s course, you directly impact, create and manage quality every day - whether you’re a senior manager or an entry-level tester. But the challenge is, as I mentioned earlier, you can’t assure quality. You don’t have the power of a CEO.

But then again, you do. Tom Peters talks about treating yourself - regardless of your job description or rank - as your own “PSF” or Professional Services Firm (PDF here). That makes total sense because you, essentially, are the boss of you. You dictate the quality of your work. You’re the CEO of the work you produce, the footprint you leave on your company, and the influence you have over others (as it relates to evangelizing quality).

So this means you can’t play the victim. I’m not saying you are, but it’s a typical feeling in the QA world to feel hamstrung by short-sighted executives, limited resources, and unreasonable schedules (especially when everyone’s looking to you to “assure” quality). In my decade-plus run in the QA trenches this is pretty much the norm when you look at it from the typical perspective of QA being at the bottom of the food chain. It can wear people down and make them feel powerless to work under the restrictions that often result from resource constraints and internal politics.

But what if you treated things from a different perspective - instead of seeing yourself as an employee (tester), or a manager (test lead/QA manager), what if you viewed yourself as the Chief Quality Officer of your own PSF - and handled your workload accordingly?

As the boss of your own PSF, “assuring quality” is equivalent to assuring your continued employment with a client - you’ve got to give them value greater than what you’re extracting from their payroll department. So as the head honcho of your own one-man/woman PSF, you have three possible avenues to take to add quality to the development process for your customer (your employer).

The “I”s Have It - 3 Roles of the CQO
As a CQO, you add value to your customers when you do one of the following:

• Inspect. In other words, this is testing. Either you do it yourself, or you assign it to testers under your care and feeding. This also includes making the tests better as often as you can.

• Infuse. This means adding value by improving the process. This happens at a higher level than testing and requires either some position of power (e.g., being a manager) or the savvy ability to …

• Influence. This is the big one. This is where you work to educate people outside the QA department to adopt improvements to the development cycle that make sense. But because people are people, you often have to do it in a way that makes them think they came up with idea. As someone once said, “Diplomacy is the art of letting somebody else have your way.”

I’ve seen many people locked into the first stage of QA - the role of testing (and nothing else). There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, because every Quality Services department needs people to, well, test the hell out of software. But to truly take on the role of the CQO, you’ve got to do more.

Most QA managers I’ve seen understand the concept of Infusing. It’s part of their role to make the process better. Their skill set allows them to infuse the process with new energy, new strategies that make the test cycle simply run better. Sadly, though, many managers stop at just improving the test process.

Getting Your Company Under The Influence
That’s why becoming an influencer is so important. A savvy CQO needs to learn the needs of the departments around him/her and see where they can help them work together. In most companies different departments develop adversarial relationships because each has its own agenda, its own pressures, its own constraints. On top of that, they have their own history of strife among members of each department. How many decisions have you seen made (or shot down) for political reasons?

A good CQO will subtly work to reconnect departments with each other again and dissolve the adversarial relationship. And that leads to a better development effort, and ultimately a better product for you to test. And how to do that is fodder for a whole slew of other articles. For now just chew on the three “I”s and ask yourself how you would approach “QA” different if you saw yourself as the CQO of your own PSF. OK? We’ll pick up on this again soon.

Till then, focus on adding massive value, wherever you are.

- Dave Navarro

I’ve got some bad news for you. Despite the “Quality Assurance” in your job title, you simply cannot assure quality. It can’t be done - at least not by you.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m sure you’re exceptionally good at what you do, and I don’t doubt your skills when it comes to testing software (or managing the test process, if that’s what you do). I would never dream of suggesting that your attempts at assuring quality will fail because you’re not good enough.

The real problem I’m talking about is that “assuring” quality is an impossible task. “Assuring” means “making sure of.” It means guaranteeing. But in reality, you can’t. Don’t believe me? Well, let me ask you this …

On any given project, can you:

• Guarantee that upper management gives the project proper funding?
• Guarantee that project management accurately estimates project task times?
• Guarantee that marketing doesn’t bloat the scope of work by promising new features?
• Guarantee that the customer provides clear, specific business requirements?
• Guarantee your programmers/designers don’t get pulled sidetracked by other projects?
• Guarantee that the test team has all the resources it needs (hardware, software, people)?
• Guarantee that the test team receives stable builds on time?
• Guarantee that code freeze is enforced when it needs to be?
• Guarantee that absolutely nobody quits, gets sick, or changes roles?
• Guarantee that stupid decisions - or impasses - aren’t caused by office politics?
• Guarantee that everyone agrees in their definition of “quality” itself?

The cold, hard truth is that a sizable chunk of what it takes to make any software project a success is totally out of control of anyone in the “Quality Assurance” group. Unless upper management grants you special, CEO-level authority, you can’t enforce the job roles of other departments. And so the concept of assuring quality is a goal that is doomed to fail even before the project begins.

But don’t lose heart. Sure, your very job title itself creates a paradox that dooms you to an unrealistic expectation of what you can deliver. But you’ll be okay? Why? Because of Rule #1 of the Chief Quality Officer:

CQO Rule #1:
You can’t assure quality … but you can sure as hell influence it.

Over the course of the next few articles I’ll be explaining exactly what it is I mean by that by discussing the three roles of the Chief Quality Officer (and why no matter what your QA position, you should consider yourself one of these CQOs). As you read the articles, you’ll get a better understanding of how you can take the elusive goal of shipping top quality products and make it fun again. Or at least more tolerable.

Till then, focus on adding massive value, wherever you are.

- Dave Navarro