Tester or Quality Coach?

The provocative title of this month's post is "Should my company ditch testers and use Quality Coaches instead?" It's that unspoken question that CEOs and testers want to ask. After all, if a CEO can get quality at half the cost, why wouldn't they explore the model? And of course, testers want to keep ahead of the curveball and be ready should their CEO choose to go down this path.

It's not binary

It's a false equivalence, though. A title that attempts to provoke more than inform. Classic polarisation technique.

Because it doesn't have to be binary, we can mix and match different operating models. In fact, depending on a team's experience and skill set and depending on the risk profile of the software under development, I can see a company using both quality coaches and testers. For instance, for high-risk work a team can choose to have a tester embedded in a team either on secondment or for full time. Or, the adverse may be true. A team with high agency and experience in testing may decide a quality coach is a better model for them.

It's the journey

A quality coach doesn't replace a tester role, it evolves from it. As a team and company mature in practice and quality activities become a team's collective tacit knowledge, it may make sense to adopt a quality coach model. That's how I first experienced quality coaching when working with a scaleup in a fintech environment.

A fairytale in tech

So, with a nod to Shane McGowan, I penned my own fairy tale, complete with godmother. It tells the story of how quality coaching came about. It's my first time allowing my writing to venture into quasi-fiction. I'm not sure what you're going to think! Let me know!

The transient nature of work

I co-authored a piece with Artem Yakimenko on the transience of tech and how expecting people to remain in one company for five years + is becoming more of an outlier than the norm.

Articles from the Community

So much great content being written. In particular, I'm noticing articles re-exploring the value of testers in companies. I find these articles fascinating to read, particularly if the broader engineering community has written them because they reflect what the testing community has been saying for years! 😆

(nod to Artem Yakimenko for sharing these with me!)

And, great to see Arlene Andrew's post in dev community

And finally, another awesome post by Maaret Pyhäjärvi, this time on model-based testing

cheerio! 🥂

Anne-Marie