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Category Based List QA and Testing Leveraging QA to improve IT Governance
Category Based List QA and Testing Leveraging QA to improve IT Governance
Infotainment
The McKinsey Quarterly
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 In a nutshell
Quality Assurance (QA) faces a range of organizational challenges that limit its effectiveness. This impacts more than just QA and overall software quality, but erodes IT Governance, putting organizations at heightened risk. By tuning roles and responsibilities, QA can become a critical contributor to effective IT Governance.
The challenges Left to fend for itself without sufficient active management support, QA faces the following challenges to its effectiveness:
Approaches to solutions When in the process QA is involved and how much time QA is granted can be rectified in two general ways; via refined software lifecycle methodology that specifies both when QA gets involved and SLAs on reasonable, consistent and measurable time periods allocated for standard tests. Empowering QA comes down to Decision Rights as part of IT Governance. It can start by simply granting QA a blanket veto over project deployments. No exceptions. The first time QA is overridden and code deployed is the moment when QA is emasculated, demoralized and ineffective. The best way to gain confidence that the software deployed is the software tested, and the software can be rebuilt from source code is to revisit SCM. The answer is not another tool, but in changing roles and responsibilities to empower QA to manage SCM. My controversial recommendation is to move the Build process and SCM repository to QA. If QA is able to do the build from source, then there is an independent confirmation that the software can be rebuilt by someone other than one developer and his private machine; do you really want to entrust your project’s source code and build exclusively to a sandal-wearing night-owl clattering on his keyboard and guzzling Jolt Cola who seems a tad too attached to wearing the same clothing daily? It also removes Development one more level away from production deployments. In other words, if QA can do a build and deployment to the QA environment, Development is freed from documenting and supporting Production deployments. It’s your system, manage it…. About the author: Joel Plaut has functioned as head of PMO, as well as CIO and CTO of public companies. With 23 years of experience as a leader in financial services, insurance and financial publishing, Joel brings a great deal of knowledge and expertise in strategy and execution managing, designing, developing and deploying enterprise-class systems.
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