QA Organisation: work visibility and transparency

In many companies work of QA organisation (QA/Test engineers or/and teams) is something hidden in darkness. Nobody knows what they are doing and accordingly do not feel all the efforts QA engineers spend for assuring high quality of delivered products.

In order to improve the situation QA organisation should improve visibility of their work. I recommend to look at the following list of ares where visualisation and transparency is needed:
  • Transparency of communication
    • Channels
      • Emails
      • Messangers
    • Who? When? What? How?
  • Availability and accessibility of all required artefacts
    • Test Strategy
    • Test Plans
    • Test cases / Checklists / Test Flows
    • Roadmap
    • Reports
    • and etc.
  • Transparency of decisions
    • Decision making process
    • Decision making group(s)
      • Chapters
      • Guilds
    • Library of documented decisions
    • Publishing decisions via all available channels
  • Current state of ongoing work
    • What is done
    • What is in progress
    • What is planned next according to the roadmap
  • Feedback loop
    • Feedback about quality from stakeholders and users
    • Feedback regarding process changes from defined target groups
  • Reporting (periodic reporting to top managers, stakeholders, QA team)
    • Ongoing work
    • Test reports
    • Plans based on the product and QA roadmap
This list can be enlarged or reduced to your particular needs, the most important is to make work of QA organisation transparent and visible to everyone in the company. 

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