Please remember: there’s a big difference between quality and testing; and so there’s a big difference between a quality strategy and a testing strategy.
Understand the Nature of Quality
The essence of quality is value to people. A quality strategy is a set of guiding ideas for building a product or service, in order to achieve the goal(s) of providing value to people. To develop a successful product, the people who are designing, building, and managing the product need to focus on success, and on making people’s troubles go away.
Quality is not a property of an object, of an event, of a piece of work, or of a situation. Quality is not intrinsic to any of those. Even though we might be tempted to say that something “has quality”, what we really mean is that we believe that someone would ascribe value to it.
Value can be assessed, roughly, by determining what someone will do or pay to get or to keep of something that they perceive that they need or desire. That something might be a product, a service, a friendship, a system, a change, a job, a vacation… Whatever it might be, that something comes at a some price. That price might be represented in dollars or effort or time or something else that must be traded for to get the something in question. If someone isn’t willing to pay the price for something, that something doesn’t have quality for that person.
Notice that perception is key here. I could show you a Lamborghini, and you might perceive it as valuable — high quality — to someone, but not to you. You might consider it to be a high-quality car — until I lift the hood and show you that there’s a carton of rusty gears in a cardboard box where the engine usually sits. Our notions of quality are provisional; they change over time.
Indeed, because the world changes, a product that stays static may decline in quality for some person, as alternative products emerge. A product that doesn’t change may increase in quality for some person as other products degrade.
There’s something else that some people get confused about — when they talk about “doing quality”. Quality isn’t an activity. Quality isn’t something people do. We don’t do value; we don’t do virtue, or virtuousness; we don’t do health.
Quality Isn’t Testing!
Most importantly: don’t confuse quality with testing! The essence of testing is evaluating something by learning about it through experiencing, exploring and experimenting. The goal of testing is to provide feedback on the true status of the product to the people who are building and managing it. A test strategy is a set of guiding ideas to accomplish that evaluation and to provide that feedback. A special part of that feedback is a focus on risk and trouble, applying critical thinking, helping the builders and managers to avoid being fooled into any false belief that everything is okay.
We test to develop an understanding of the status of the product and potential problems we perceive about it. From that, we can make inferences about how quality might be threatened in the eyes of some person that matters to us. Those are only inferences, though; again, any notion of quality is always relative to some person, that person’s perceptions, and that person’s values. Good testers make strong and reliable inferences about what might or might not threaten quaity. We should not consider ourselves “quality gatekeepers”, though Unless we’re also managers, we don’t have the authority to decide whether the gate will open or remain shut.
While the testing strategy supports the quality strategy, a tester’s perspective requires a different stance. A quality strategy is driven by envisioning success; applying the maker’s mindset. A testing strategy is driven by the faith that problems are there to be found. That requires a critic’s mindset. The testing strategy supports the quality strategy by discovering threats to success, so that they can be revealed and addressed.
Given all that, a quality strategy and a testing strategy are very different. Don’t mix them up!
Another of the those posts that originated on LinkedIn. It was updated from the original version when it was published on 2024-10-22. After a couple of days, I decided it wasn’t of sufficient quality to me, so I updated it again on 2024-10-24.
Thank you for this great article! I agree with your view that testing and quality are different. In my company, testers explore and test the application to report results. On the other hand, the quality team focuses on design reviews, risk analysis, process checks, improvements, compliance (like ISO and FDA), audits, and coordinating with other teams to improve quality.
However, some testers call themselves “Quality Engineers” or “QA.” Why is this happening? Do you think they are wrong?
I’ve written about “quality assurance” before, and I’ll be writing a post on “quality engineering” eventually. For now, I’ll say that when people refer to testers as “quality engineers” or “quality assurance”, it’s at the intersection of title inflation on the one hand, and some fairly incoherent thinking about what testing and quality mean on the other.