The recipe for success
When you consider the ingredients of great software or hardware solutions, it is usually a collection of logical, reasoned decisions and methods based on quantitative data, with an added sprinkle of something different, something qualitative that ensures a product meets or surpasses the wishes of the customer. This almost immeasurable difference-maker can seem like magic, although a wise woman once said, “Magic’s just science we don’t understand yet”.
The strange thing is that we are always searching for it. Beautiful, modern, cool, quick, responsive, simple, easy, intuitive, clear, fun, are all subjective terms, and yet every day we attempt to build products to meet these definitions and expectations from customers, with varying degrees of success. So the question is, how do you test for this in a product? if the final product is brought to life by this mixture of quantitative and qualitative data points, how can QA follow the same approach?
Testing in today’s world
Today, if a development team is lucky enough to have a dedicated test engineer, they are expected to be multi-faceted, capable of creating test plans, identifying and creating test cases, writing automated test scripts and spotting errors in code. In many ways this was the logical path as we moved away from the waterfall processes and the associated large, dedicated teams of test engineers. In recent years, dedicated teams have been replaced by more feature-driven, multi-functional teams, with testing responsibilities shared between the members to promote built-in quality.
While the original intentions were good, I believe this has led to critical changes in how we implement testing as a practice. The focus on shifting left, automating more and making the dedicated tester position almost redundant, seems to have led many to move away from the immeasurable parts of testing, which are arguably the most important to the end user.
Why the Q11 Method
The Q11 brings the right balance back to testing, by providing a method that ensures the requirements and tests fully consider the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the product.
Using a series of 11 simple but , well-defined questions, product managers, developers, test engineers and more can focus on the complete product when looking at quality within their own scope, while applying a shared approach to finding, verifying and validating the answers.
You can use this method within any development process, from Scrum to SAFE to Waterfall and the V-Model, and at any stage of your product development cycle, from defining the initial business case down to component or unit testing if desired. You can also just as easily use it as the guidance for your exploratory testing approach, making sure you cover all the basics as you see fit.
So what are you waiting for?
