Quality Gardeners and Quality Coaches at Job&Talent
How we implemented Quality Assistance in teams while Job&Talent Engineering was changing its structure.
By Alba Herraez and Ivan del Viso Perez
Do you remember that in my previous article I gave a few hints about the changes that had taken place in JT?
Just a short recap: changes in product, communication and processes; changes in the company organisation and, in addition, multiple changes in the staffing of teams.
Of course, every change brings twists and turns. It takes some extra time and effort to arrive at stability and a certain security. Both of which are at the same time so precious and so relative.
In the meantime, Job&Talent’s engineering structure changed significantly. How did we face this challenge to make our new approach of quality management a reality? Read on!
Global changes
Job&Talent has been redefined by the end of the Operations department. The reason behind it was boosting the engineering and product verticals. That new approach gave grounds to the creation of two new verticals. Some of the old teams were integrated, some split while others — created from scratch.
My colleague Cyprian Łakomy sheds more light on the process in these two articles:
- Marketplace, Attendance and Scale. What are the three JT product verticals?
- The shape of Job&Talent Engineering in 2023
Over the next couple of months, our app will undergo a deep redesign. Not only the UI, but also the UX will be altered. Also, there will be significant changes such as login or access to some sections without creating an account, a list of opportunities called “job feed”, etc. Anyone who knew the app beforehand will realise all of this just by opening it.
On the other hand, our internal product created for management of candidates and employees will also undergo major changes. Our constant interest in user feedback has made us very conscious of their needs.
Despite maintaining two systems at the same time and the effort it takes, we could say that it has been a great decision and we believe that we are on the right track.
Quality Assistance changes
At Job&Talent, we go about quality with an assistance approach. E.g. as a coach, or a mentor if you will, who collaborates with each and every member of any team; with the commitment to implement Agile and holistic testing habits.
If we consider how much the engineering and product team have grown, we will clearly see the need for the quality team to grow as well. Therefore, we went from one QA to six. All with different experiences and expertise, but with a clear shared vision of what we understand as quality.
The first incorporation was Ivan as the team manager. He was in charge of defining and leading the strategy of the new team. This is why I have invited him to tell us a little more about that landing!
Ivan’s tale
Hello, Ivan speaking. I arrived at the company at a point, which coincided with one of the most beautiful moments of Alba’s life… the birth of her son.
The company has a strong vision about how to lead the QA team. In a nutshell, the quality needs to grow from the teams, and not from individuals. Each team designated one member as a Quality Gardener, a person who would “seed” quality-related actions within the teams, as Alba explained in the previous article.
I came from a different perspective on managing QA teams. In that approach, every team had its own dedicated tester taking care of the quality. This new approach, however, made me fall in love with it.
There is no QA team that can guide me, which makes my new work attractive, but at the same time, not the easiest one. I realised that working with gardeners is a good way to start, but if you want to help them, it’s impossible without working hand in hand, mentoring/guiding them, or giving them room to experiment with the quality. And there are too many of them to be guided by only one person.
From my point of view, the best option to tackle that was to create a QA team that helped me to reach all the teams, that had the same way of thinking, and most importantly, that shared my passion. That’s how I created the role of the Quality Coach in order to shape the new QA team.
What do you mean by a Quality Coach?
First of all, we must admit that we were strongly influenced by Anne-Marie Charrett’s role. In our case, the role arises from the need to create a figure who is closer to the designated Quality Gardener in each team so that they can be guided and supported.
At the same time, the coach can work together with them and the team to which they belong, and collectively boost quality through facilitation, education, experimentation, and visualisation.
As a Quality Coach, is nice to have a wide variety of skills:
- Observation — Monitor and observe the current state and process to find gaps or maintain and improve the quality of the process and product.
- Good listener — Listening to your QA gardeners is essential for understanding and studying the current state.
- Domain knowledge — Together with understanding your product and customers, it is vital in connecting the dots and thinking about functional dependencies.
- Setting up the culture/mindset/processes — You are driving quality, and you are the one who needs to establish the three main pillars of quality: culture, mindset and process.
- Risk analysis — Study edge cases, dependencies, and analyse the impact on the outcome.
- Empathising — You need to act as a customer advocate, understand the developer’s pain points, and align with the business, designers, and stakeholders.
- Technical skills — You don’t need to code functionalities, but you need to create tools that help the developers to improve their code.
How did it affect Quality Gardeners?
You can’t force a flower to grow, and so you can’t force the team to work in quality. You need to give them an objective. You need to facilitate tools, give them information and explanation. You need to solve their doubts. Only then, do they start to grow.
For that reason, the first thing that we did was give them a path to reach the goal of improving our quality. We called this path the QA Journey. A quarterly plan decided by the team, that lets them focus on improving several quality initiatives, step by step.
Next time, we will expand on the topic of the QA journey.
New Quality Assistance tools for all
The QA journey provided us with a framework to shape new “tools”. With the collaboration of Quality Coaches, Quality Gardeners could share these tools with their teams for easier learning and more optimised work.
One of the first presents that teams received was the automation tool. It allowed all teams to execute end-to-end automation testing regardless of the environment. It also lets a team share the responsibility of automation script creation. Now, backend developers can create scripts that can be used by the iOS developers. Or Android developers can create them to be executed in the backend web page. Thanks to this, the silos are starting to disappear.
Teams also received a tool allowing them to manage all tests and improvements in one place. Apart from managing a test, you can also review the functional coverage. The tool is also connected to the previous automation tool.
Standardised metrics help teams to measure their quality and know if they are improving or not. In this case, the teams realised that the information managed was too general. The metrics are continuously improved to fetch information that might be of essential value.
Other tools, even if not not based on something tangible, improve the way of working, like the updated Definition of Done, etc. As you can see, over the last few months, we have not been bored at all.
The time and format of the Gardener’s bi-weeklies
With the increase of participants in the Gardener’s bi-weekly meeting, it became overwhelming to maintain the old format based on sharing the work done and a discussion about one specific topic.
As a result, we decided that the bi-weekly meetings would be shorter, would be recorded and would be a platform to share any relevant experience regarding quality, carried out by one of the members of the forum.
This can be approached in many different ways, and if you give teams the autonomy, you create a supportive and enriching learning environment. We are working on activating attendees as much as possible during these meetings, yet we know it will take some time.
The way of working hand-in-hand with the Gardeners
The possibility for each vertical to have a QA Coach has made it easier to work more closely with the gardeners.
Each vertical or tribe has defined a different way of working with its QA Coach, however, there is a large similarity in ceremonies like kickoffs, catch-ups and retrospectives regarding the QA Journey. There are also 1-on-1s between the Gardeners and the QA Coaches with the aim of aligning on the quality initiatives implemented in the teams.
Conclusion
Looking back, the idea behind Quality Gardeners has changed drastically. We like to see it more as an evolution based on different needs that have arisen along the way.
At the same time, it’s hard not to feel a certain nostalgia or find some changes hard to adjust to. However, all this has led me to a continuous learning process where listening and going beyond the words has been key.
It has also strengthened my opinion about working groups like this within an organisation; they should proliferate even more! At least in my experience, I believe that the right approach profoundly encourages a sense of belonging, respect, teamwork and many other positive values with a huge impact within a company.
