Isabel Evans, Testing Solutions Group, UKA principal consultant at Testing Solutions Group, Isabel Evans has more than twenty years of experience in the IT industry, working in quality management, testing, training, and documentation in the financial, communications, and software sectors. The author of Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork, Isabel has spoken on software quality, testing, and test management at conferences worldwide. Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and a Fellow of the British Computer Society
The Blind Men Meet The Quality Elephant: How What They See Affects The IT TeamBy moving our key measures within the IT closer to our customers’ corporate measures we can ensure we meet their strategy for quality and governance
Simple alignments between a well founded organisational excellence model and the work of the test team to help measurement and improvement, in order to relate to the customer
In the end the risks we take with testing are risks that affect our customer, our colleagues and ourselves. Our testing may enable or prevent our customer meeting goals, fulfilling strategy, or even achieving proper governance.
In the IT team, and especially in testing and audit, we concentrate on measuring such items as defect density and product attributes. We see testing as an activity which is designed to help mitigate risk. Yet testing and reviews may increase risk; for the test team, for the IT project and for the customer organisation. Sometimes we believe we are working towards providing better solutions for our customers yet they reject our efforts. Why is this?
Quality is an elephant found by blind men who think they can see; it can be experienced in many ways. Different people within an organization may hold different opinions about quality, depending on their roles and viewpoint. If the IT teams focus on one definition (their own) they may not communicate well with others in the organization who use a different definition. We need to listen and understand the quality viewpoints of others, if they are to deliver what is required.
In the end the risks we take with IT are risks that affect our customer, our colleagues and ourselves. Our work may enable or prevent our customer meeting goals, fulfilling strategy, or even achieving proper governance.
If we examine the framework for excellence used by our customer organisations we will often find ways to measure our success in relation to their corporate goals and strategy. This enables us to understand how our work helps the customers’ strategy for quality and governance.
