Ask HN: How to motivate QA to have more initiative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to motivate QA to have more initiative?

4 pointsCaeous4 comments

We'd like to increase the initiative of our QA team.

Their current workflow is as follows:

1. The dev team creates a JIRA for a new feature with the spec. Once the feature is complete, it is assigned to a TestQueue.

2. The QA team looks at the TestQueue and assigns the JIRAS to themselves to begin testing.

3. They test the new feature to make sure that it meets the specs. If a bug is found, a comment is added and the JIRA is re-assigned to the dev to fix.

The problem is that there isn't any initiative to go beyond making sure the initial spec is met. Only the minimum amount of work is done. They don't really make an effort to see if there are more bugs that could have crept up from implementing the new work.

We're looking for any kind of advice/ideas on how we could improve our management of the QA team.

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They're not doing QA. They're doing QC. QC (quality checking) is making sure that things have been done properly and the spec has been met. And, as you've discovered, the problem with QC is that it's usually limited to checking what the spec says and little more. QA is about defining processes that assure quality from the beginning - QA people need to be involved during the requirements gathering, writing the specification, during the build process, all from the perspective of making a quality product. Get the QA team involved long before things hit the test queue in focusing on how they can improve the final product from the start, including things like writing unit tests, organising focus groups, sitting in on code reviews, documenting things, and so on.

It sounds like your QA team believes their purpose is to test that basic functionality is working as intended. This puts the focus on "checking the boxes" and not exploring edge cases or applying their deep knowledge of your product to try to find shortcomings.

I strongly believe that automating the repetitive and mindless aspects of the QA process is the crucial step to shifting their attitude. Automated UI tests can give everyone confidence within minutes that core functionality has not regressed. This allows the QA team to dive into a product or feature in a creative way and do their best to find the rough edges and help make the product better.

I have a consulting practice exclusively dedicated to helping startups with this very process: http://structurehq.com

Does your QA team have experience and training in testing? Is the person managing the QA team knowledgeable about testing? If not, maybe you need to spend more time to train them, or spend more money to hire better qualified testers. You get what you pay for.

Also, how do your developers treat your QA team? Do they treat them as respected colleagues or as nuisances? If the testers are treated poorly by the developers, they probably wouldn't be motivated to do great work.

Finally, is your QA team part of your company or are they outsourced contractors? Employees of contracting companies are generally going to care less about doing a good job for your company than your own employees, whose career paths depend on the success of your company.

Setup code coverage tools and make them ensure a certain percentage of code coverage.

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