By Rich Mort
In a past life, some years back, I attended a sales call as a Test Consultant with a fresh faced new go gettem' salesman who was determined to meet his annual sales quota within his first quartile at his new employer. Our victim: a Head of Testing at a Water Utility; a very busy gentlemen and one that had obviously been visited by the majority of the then up and coming new testing service companies that were sprouting up at the time. The meeting kicked off well, with our bright new star discussing our company's testing capability whilst walking through a variety of vividly coloured slides.
Things took a turn for the worse, however, when our sales hero clasped his hands together, stared into the face of our would-be client and agony aunt style asked now where is your pain, perhaps we could run a health check for you?'. The transition from polite but slightly bored to raging-bull was dramatic to say the least, and with shouts of if I get one more company offering me a health check for my pain and charging me a fortune for what I already know!', we were left in no doubt that this probably would not be the prime service to lead with ..
Once everyone had calmed down, and I had extracted my young salesman from behind the filing cabinet, our new friend explained that almost every company walking through the door had offered some form of testing health-check exercise. He considered this a lazy, expensive, and wasteful way to sell and felt this was little short of allowing an external supplier to come in through the door and run riot at my expense!'.
What is a health check good for? There is no doubt that the phrase health check' is now winced at in our industry and can be considered as one of the most over used and tired phrases in our testing service dictionary. Many companies on the receiving end of these exercises cite the limited benefits that they feel they have received:
the health check just told us what we already knew!'
the recommendations stated were never put in place as day-to-day issues and business as usual pressure kicked in'
the health check focused on pure testing issues but most of our testing issues derive from outside testing's influence!'
they interviewed thirty of our staff who all told them the same thing - they could have understood our problems after speaking to three of our people'
our people have a day job to do - this was just a distraction'
its focus was too bland - we had a specific scope to cover'.
So, it's obvious that these exercises are a complete waste of time, providing little benefit at great cost, sucking in energy and effort that could be better used sorting out day-to-day issues and acting as little more than an initial door-opener for new-client hungry service providers eager to take over the internal testing team's duties at great expense.
Well, I don't actually agree with any of that.
Change your mindset Firstly, let's stop thinking health check' and start thinking improvement'. So no more use of the H' word in this text. It's safe to say that of the thousands of testing individuals, test teams, user departments, developers, third party suppliers and service providers out there, not all of them are working at an optimum performance level, let alone at a satisfactory good enough' level.
This would also be the case for process optimisation and with so many companies now initiating and progressing through complex Digital Transformation programmes, QA based optimisation is key to their success.
The approach to testing could be immature, ineffective or inefficient. There could be issues between individuals, teams, Technical versus Business Units, Client and Supplier. The challenges could be within the Testing arena or interweaved into the wider IT and Business psyche of the company in question. There could be a lack of understanding, expertise or reluctance to change and accept, for example, how QA could drive Digital Transformation programmes using such approaches as shift-left.
For instance, Puppet Technology, a company focusing on Infrastructure Automation, stated that teams who successfully integrate testing as a partnership within the entire development process spend 22% less time on unplanned work. Development teams who build quality in and work with QA early on have more time for new, value-adding work.
How testing has evolved Testing is now a very mature industry. The capability of internal test teams has, in many cases, grown to a point that outside help would not provide the same benefit compared to say, 10 to 15 years ago. The title of Head of Testing' is now commonplace and many of these testing champions are now undertaking their own test maturity studies and initiatives to take their own testing capability to a safer' and better' place. For these plucky testing champions, improving their testing lot comes naturally and many will succeed. However, not all will be so fortunate and some proposed visions may fall on the deaf ears of certain stakeholders with end quality suffering as a result.
So, in certain companies, identification, and implementation of potential test improvement around process, people, environment, and data, plus many other key areas could potentially bring clear and measurable benefit. But who should carry exercise this out - an internal or external driven team? There are benefits to be had from both approaches:
INTERNAL EXTERNAL
Could be considered more cost effective Often fixed price - can be very cost effective
Internal expertise - best knowledge from a systems / business / internal SDLC perspective External expertise - may follow a specific test review methodology and / or focus on a specific scope e.g. QA enablement within a Digit
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By Rich Mort
