Changes when moving from testing to quality coaching
If you are changing/moving from a testing role to a quality coach role there are some changes that you may have to get used to. In this article I will go through some of these changes.
You will have to be less hands on
What do I means by hands on? I mean working on the feature itself and understanding exactly what it does and how it does it. When coaching you are typically further away from the coal face than you would be if you were a tester. Now as a tester you may be involved in things such as user story refinement, writing automated tests and manual testing. As a quality coach you are not involved in these as the team do the testing and your role is to help them improve the quality of the features they deliver and the many elements that that entails. In fact, the coaching role covers such a broad range of elements that you wont have the time to get involved in the detail. This can be hard at first but over time you can be confident that the features that your teams deliver (with your input) give the user a great experience.
You will be working across multiple teams
As quality coaches are not as hands on, your time will typically be split across multiple teams. Expect that you will have to coach and mentor multiple teams working on multiple different areas of the product. This requires management of your time in such a way that you gave give the teams the attention and coaching that they need in order to grow in a way that ultimately ends in a mature quality process. As you will be across multiple teams there will be more meetings and you need to prioritise what meetings are the most important and which ones can you add the most value to. You also need to be aware at a reasonable level what work the teams are working on. For example, if you are helping the team with acceptance criteria you need to know the feature well enough so that you can help write them in such a way that they are valuable and help people understand the feature. But you don’t need to know the intricacies of what classes have been impacted by the change and the reason why the developer indexed a column on a database table.
You will be a jack of all trades and master of none
As a tester your role is typically very specific and targeted on testing a feature - whether it be manually or with automation. However with quality coaching and the fact that testing does not equal quality you need to know and understand more about the entire SDLC and where quality fits in, so you will also need to think about things such as observability and monitoring.
Looking at Lisa Crispin’s and Janet Gregory’s Holistic testing model above and using it as a guide, you may do things like…
Discover
- Understand the domain and the customers
- Determine the value of the potential features
Plan
Help the team understand risk and how they can manage it
Help the team create testable stories
Understand
Help teams with writing good acceptance criteria
Understand what should be monitored and observed.
Build
Run mob testing sessions
Guide teams on how best to test
Deploy
- Make sure the team have tests for things like performance
Release
- Make sure that the team are able to roll back the changes should they need to
Observe
- Observe customers usage
Learn
- Help the teams understand what can be learnt from the feature that they have just released.
So the areas to get involved in are more than testing. Quality can be improved in all of them, so as a quality coach, be prepared to dive into any these to help drive that improvement in quality. It may be uncomfortable at times but there are so many resources out there you can use to gain an understanding in these quite quickly. For me I had no real knowledge about observability and monitoring, so to overcome this I watched some videos on data dog. I then set about creating my own dashboards to build my basic understanding. This put me in good stead to talk about observability and monitoring to my teams.
Know what is going on in the software world around you
Be aware of what is going on in the software industry - this not only includes testing but includes things like development, the cloud and agile practices. There is so much going on in all of the components that make up the SDLC as well as software development in general. Having a knowledge of these are are great for helping you come up with new ideas as well as providing inspiration for changes you may want to make to improve your teams. I’m not saying you have to have in depth knowledge of every blog post, LinkedIn article or YouTube video. You just need to have an little understanding of things that are being talked about in the various communities.
The testing will be done differently
When you are a tester you are in sole control of how you test. As a quality coach it will be the engineers that test so it will probably be done differently to how you would have done it. The engineers will miss bugs. They may do their testing in ways that make no sense to you. However, one of the most important things as a coach is to help the team grow so you will be there to help them work out how best to test. This may take some time bit the most important thing is that you enable the team to make mistakes and give them the autonomy to test how they think is right.
You will have to be a self-starter
As a quality coach you will not be told or know that you need to go and test x or y. You will need to be able to:
Identify areas that your teams may need help with
What areas do you think your team need help with? Well you need to understand how your team works and what they gdo to have any chance of doing this. So you have to be a self-starter and go and speak to your team members or observe how they work as a team. You can look into their last few releases as well as other things that will give you vital information as to how your team operate. This is not something that someone will tell you everything about. Yes you may get bits and bobs from people but you will need to piece together how it all interlinks to understand the team and what you could do to help them. This will be something that you will need to do on your own as the teams you support are busy doing their day to day work.
Be there to support your teams if needed
Tams will ask for help. You will then need to go and think about how you can give them that help in the most efficient way that will enable them to improve the quality of what they produce. How are you g0ing to do this? Well may need to run some workshops or do some knowledge sharing - but what you need to do requires you to go out and understand exactly the help that the team require and the best way to deliver it.
Run workshops
An important element of coaching is that of education. As a quality coach you will be running workshops that help educate your teams on various quality aspects that will help the team. These workshops may involve individuals or they may involve whole teams. Now running workshops can be daunting and for the first few you may not get it exactly right but that’s OK. You will improve over time and when the team understand the benefit that the workshops produce, they will be happy to have more of them. They key to workshops is to get everyone involved and make sure everyone contributes. In all teams there are more dominant voices but people who are less vocal often have excellent suggestions and insights that can transforms the entire team. My advice for workshops is to start with something simple. Also run the idea of the workshop past a couple of people in the team first to get their feedback as they will have an idea of how the team may feel about the workshop and help you tweak it.
Leave the team
This is the goal of any quality coach - leave the team!!! You should leave the team in a better state than you found it and they should be able to identify areas where quality needs improvement and be self-sufficient and improve under their own steam.
I have written a post on why a quality coaches aim is to make themselves redundant
Summary
Yes there will be changes when you move from testing to a more quality coach focussed role. Some of these will take time in getting used to but the key thing to remember is that your impact will widen across multiple parts of the SDLC and you will play a key role in your teams success.
My next article be what you can do to help you in these changes