In today’s Agile environment, a company’s level of technical and agile development can still vary, and sometimes there is a crucial need for businesses to introduce dedicated specialists to their teams who are skilled in the area of Quality Management. Here, we highlight 10 challenges that indicate it’s time to introduce QM expertise to your team.

Live incidents with quite high severity

If you find that you’re increasingly receiving negative feedback from end users that are converted into high-severity issues, this could be suggesting that quality is being sacrificed. In this situation, A QM engineer would hold a holistic quality setup analysis to find the root cause and suggest the appropriate solution.

Slow delivery

It could be becoming increasingly difficult to get everything ready for production release due to certain factors such as manual testing taking too long, lots of issues only revealed at the last stages of the development cycle and it taking too much time to fix those issues accordingly.

Again, this shows that a Quality Strategy doesn’t work effectively. The main goal of QM specialists is to set up the proper QA strategy which is designed around all business needs, goals and constraints.

Not all acceptance criteria are implemented, and features don’t cover all business needs

Even though from an E2E perspective the software can behave well, it may be picked up by a team member, customer or user that some valuable functionality is missed. This could be because there was no one to set up the process of checking whether everything and each separate component of the application is functional and works as intended.

Some integrations aren’t working correctly, or business needs aren’t covered fully from an E2E perspective

This is partially related to the previous point, which can happen when there are separate teams working on separate components. Everyone is assigned to their own module, but it is becoming difficult to integrate everything in the end, so teams can face issues with the integration phase.

To make it less consuming, we suggest adding QM expertise to the team who are looking for quality from an E2E perspective and working out integration testing strategies from the very beginning which is an integral part of the entire QA strategy.

Insufficient test coverage, no clarity on what should be tested and if anything is missed

This challenge can appear alongside users’ complaints on quality, and it shows that test coverage hasn’t been properly handled, so as a result quality suffers.

This is one of the very basic QM thought-out test types and coverage, so a dedicated QM specialist will always track the progress and fill the gaps in terms of testing progress and quality level at every point in time.

Poor application performance

Are you irritated by the system’s long response times and pages loading longer than expected? It’s time to consider involving QM expertise to address non-functional requirement testing and take care of different kinds of Performance testing that could be implemented via various tools.

No confidence in release readiness

If the time is here to push big changes live is approaching and the quality level or application readiness can’t be evaluated, it becomes a challenge to get sign-off and it’s a case that lots of questions come up at the very last stage about release timelines, steps, DoD, then think of adding a QM professional.

They can assess the current quality level, highlight existing QA strategy gaps, apply quick fixes to it and suggest a Quality Roadmap with clear steps from a short, mid and long-time perspective. 

Deploy downtimes and issues with CI/CD

Is there anything wrong with the pipelines which may fail and it’s time-consuming to get everything deployed? QM specialist is the one who ensures the tests are integrated properly into the pipelines with the corresponding reporting mechanisms, who will organise test runs within CI as quality gates and suggest the proper order, environments and test types to execute according to the selected branching strategy and many aspects of software infrastructure and architecture.

The team doesn’t realise they should own quality

It takes time to find the responsible people to investigate what’s going wrong or find out the root cause of bugs but also issues with the QA process. We will use our QM expertise to join the team and promote a quality mindset alongside setting up the relevant QA strategy in a way that the whole team are involved, and QM isn’t considered the only responsible for a quality person.

There are some tests, but bugs aren’t found

If you feel existing tests don’t bring value, are not able to reveal issues which are found in live by end users that highlight that the existing tests or auto tests have been developed with the wrong logic, poor application behaviour coverage, skipped within test runs or simply aren’t enough from testing pyramid perspective.

QM professionals will always suggest the best approach to functional testing coverage (Unit, Component, Integration, Contract, API, API E2E or UI E2E, etc.), integrate the tests into the pipelines and adjust CI/CD if needed. Our QM engineers are always ready to consider E2E alongside each component and integration testing coverage and execute the testing either manually or automate where appropriate. Bringing a critical thinking mindset and being attentive to edge cases ensures the tests bring overall value to the user, resulting in more positive feedback.