Why don’t we talk about Quality Gardeners?

Read how Jobandtalent switched from quality assurance to quality assistance and learn the role of Quality Gardeners in Product teams.

Written by Alba Herraez

How many single-member quality teams in a company do we know? Or how many times have we seen that a quality team was non-existent? How many adverse situations related to quality do these teams experience across multiple organisations?

As a company, Jobandtalent is always after progress and improvement. This means we keep a determined and proactive attitude whenever facing a problem. How do we go about quality on a daily basis?

Follow me to learn about the quality assistance approach and the role of quality gardeners at JT. In case you’ve never heard of them, it’s high time you discovered their importance in the software dev lifecycle!

JT’s road to Quality Assistance

When I joined Jobandtalent, the company’s scenario was like this:

• JT was a successful startup with a top Product team.
• The change in JT’s business direction led to the dissolution of the Quality Assurance team.
• 180º change in terms of approaching quality and boosting the company to the top.
• Hey! We are growing very confident about our quality. Why don’t we hire a Quality Assistant to join us?
• Here is where my story begins. I joined the mobile team and worked with 2 out of 5 Product teams.
• Oh! We also want Quality Assistance in our team!

Up to this point, I hope there is more than one person who can relate to this and to the challenge that came with it. Complaints don’t help, and neither do they change this situation we find ourselves in. It’s time to turn on the proactivity lever and take a deep look inside to find a possible solution!

You may have noticed that in the early days JT had a Quality Team made up of Quality Assurance roles.

However, when I joined, the situation and needs had evolved into a “new quality project” focused on Quality Assistance roles. Quality Assistance involves the engagement of each team member towards the improved quality of the product, instead of relying on traditional quality assurance as a separate, post-development stage of the dev cycle (Antoine explains it well in this article).

This new approach is intrinsically connected to the origin of what I am going to tell you here.

Staying creative during the hard times

As I said before, it had been a part of two product squads under the umbrella of the mobile Core team (formed by iOS and Android leads) for two years. Our work was based on following the journey that any of our users would make. It covered mobile projects, as well as the web ones.

This strategy gave us a transversal knowledge of our product, as well as a pretty tight vision of the constraints that the user could face.

Sounds good, right?

Well, technically it does… Until you face the complexities of scaling this approach with only one Quality Assistance person and five product squads (and growing!).

In search for answers, I read these two articles:

• There Is No More Quality Assurance published by QE Unit.
• Measuring Quality published by Kristine.

I quickly connected with the idea of designating Quality Leaders/Advocates or Gardeners, as we call them at Jobandtalent, within the squads.

Why didn’t I think of this before?

Instead of reinventing the wheel, it’s much easier to find the key to our needs after doing a little research and learning from others’ experience. Once we find similar problems, we usually need a few refinements to come up with the solution to the ones we have.

This is how we shaped the Quality Gardeners initiative that gave name to this article.

First steps

Once an idea has been selected, it is time to shape it taking our context into account. When we’re done with that, we are going to share it and receive feedback as soon as possible.

The steps I followed were:

1. Carry a retro with each squad to receive context about their quality-related needs.
2. Review the results with my manager and share them with the squads.
3. Build a real initiative proposal. Initially, we called it ‘Guardians of the quality’.
4. Present it to all tech leads and engineering managers to get feedback.

Why so? Because we do not always see the value of the things we have until we miss them. Or, the other way around, because by walking into someone else’s shoes, we may discover something that we also desire.

The proposal was to create a working group formed by a member of each squad, which would be rotating and meet bi-weekly with the purpose of:

• Seeding quality. It is implementing processes, tools, etc., within each squad that boosted both internal (team) and external (product) quality.
• Quality on top. By this, we mean promoting and caring about the quality inside Jobandtalent’s engineering culture.
• Sharing knowledge/processes. Meaning highlighting different needs that have Quality Assistance implications.

Halfway

During the first 3 months, the bi-weekly meetings had great attendance and many topics to discuss. The new “gardener” role was attractive to most of the developers, and in a more or less voluntary way, they wanted to get involved in this new paradigm for quality which Jobandtalent trusts.

It was also key that several Engineering Managers were involved: they not only attended, but also actively participated in the meetings.

The first sessions were brainstorming with a focus on pain points and needs across all the squads. Other details that characterised the meetings were: starting with a random question that helped us break the ice and get familiar with each other, as well as setting times that we applied to finish with clear tasks.

Next, we implemented a framework that helped us classify the initiatives based on quality attributes. We adopted these attributes from Kristine’s article that I mentioned in previous points.

It was also considered highly relevant to have some data that would help us:

• evaluate the impact of the actions that were being implemented
• and highlight other needs.

As a result, we created a board like this one for each squad, with Jira development and support projects as sources of information.

At the end of the year, and after three months of running the initiative, we shared a survey with all the Gardeners. The goal was to collect feedback anonymously. We all know that this is the way in which we feel freer to express ourselves. We asked about the initiative itself and about its impact on the squads.

Looking at the results, it may seem that there was not much participation. However, we have to bear in mind that at that time there were only 5 squads in Jobandtalent. So, after that, we had clarity about the points of improvement for the new year.

Nowadays

As I was saying, we closed the year to start 2023 focused and with changes in the way of working of the initiative. But the changes didn’t stop there.

Jobandtalent has grown to more than twice the number of squads and divided into four verticals plus Core teams. How does it translate to the number of Gardeners in the company? We have moved from 5 to 18 and we’re still growing.

The Quality Assistance team has also undergone a major change. The Quality Assistance team has gone from being made up of one person to five different roles, plus the manager.

This has given us more muscle to spread the Quality Assistance approach and is also allowing us to provide individual support to the Gardeners, while we move forward with the automation projects.

However, all of this is a very high-level summary that will be detailed in the next chapter.

Conclusion

Looking for new ways of introducing and boosting the quality of both work and product, is one of the biggest professional challenges that we can face.

The beginnings are always uphill, especially when we remember past experiences and our resistance against the unknown becomes strong. Or as Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘it is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed’.

In both cases, my biggest learning has been to take baby steps that acknowledge the expectations of each participant. Our quality gardeners initiative has fetched great benefits like:

• sharing knowledge and responsibility about quality,
• active collaboration between developers and shifting left quality activities/projects,
• introducing quality into the culture of the engineering team.

To be realistic, the road has not been easy, nor is fully adopted. Nonetheless, we gathered feedback to constantly listen to all parties: developers, engineering managers… and gave freedom to those who did not want to participate in the initiative, favouring other approaches for quality.

But as I said, that’s for another chapter. To be continued. :)