August 11, 2023

In today’s collaborative landscape, the concept of quality binds teams and individuals, emphasizing shared responsibility.

Why is a Quality coach crucial to an organization?

Quality touches everything and everyone. It is a team responsibility that binds individuals while building quality together. Teams and organizations, nowadays, strive to be involved rather than being told what to do.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.” Benjamin Franklin

And that, in essence, is the importance of having a quality coach, within teams and organizations; to help the team(s) get involved in quality engineering activities not by telling them what to do but by guiding them to find the solution themselves and understand their own problems in-depth.

What background does a Quality Coach need?

A quality coach is a role that challenges and supports a team or organization to actively build in quality together, by either coaching, facilitating, training or mentoring, depending on the need.

There is no magical formula to onboard into this role. I view this role as a mix of different tasks inspired by other positions. Based on needs, we can focus on finding coaching roles more centered around the product and ensuring quality.

  • Software Developer giving advice on testability, setting up test automation strategies, choosing the right design patterns and other good practices to test automation to amplify code reviews within teams to improve the way automated tests are established and contribute to building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
  • Software Tester firstly having the soft skills including communication, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and good communication, while also providing the necessary support to teams to properly identify and assess technical and/or business risks, creating test strategies, test reporting by providing the necessary information depending on who’s the target audience, heuristics and oracles to solve problems and make decisions under uncertainly conditions which could help improving test design and test coverage.
  • Delivery Lead developing a work strategy and process flow, encouraging team members to adopt new approaches and improve ways of working for better collaboration as a team. This could be through workshop facilitation, and giving regular feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement
  • Product Manager sharing his quality/product vision in the roadmap to enabling the adoption of the right changes and help teams prioritize the quality improvement workstreams while providing ideas on how to improve and measure quality through facilitation and visualization
  • Coaching Role developing the team’s skills and abilities and a way to boost their performance. This role can also be ideal  in tackling issues and challenges at the initial stage before they become major problems. This could be done by asking powerful questions that change the team’s way of thinking and guiding them in the right direction

Embracing Coaching: The Key to Successful Organizational Transformation for IT Teams

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, organizations are constantly striving to stay ahead of the competition. To enhance their agility and software delivery speed, many are turning to DevOps culture. Alongside this transformation, the adoption of Agile methodologies becomes crucial.

Emna Ayadi

Emna Ayadi

Agile Quality Coach, Sogeti France