Organization wide test strategy – Step1 – Deriving our quality values

This post is originally posted on our company blog, any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Our company has moved more from delivering individual consultant services to taking whole in-house product commitments delivered as a service to our customers. During the last months we have also been in a process of re-evaluating the core company values. Through this values work it has been clear that we want to feel proud about the quality delivered to our customers.

The transition in itself has evolved in a good agile manner, where a bigger quality initiative was a natural step forward. My first task was to investigate the current (not explicitly stated) quality values and propose an organization wide quality vision which has been lacking. This post will explain what I have done so far and the further work on it. The further work consists of defining models and activities to use in an implementation of our values.

Since quality covers many aspects of software development, it was clear at an early stage that our present status was not always that the product itself was of bad quality. Sometimes the development team think the quality is bad but the customer is happy, and sometimes the other way around. It actually goes down to managing the expectations of all stakeholders (team, customers, end users etc) and maximize the perceived quality accordingly.