QA questions for everyone to ask
My former colleague Michael Scotto recently wrote about quality assurance and asking questions:
Many use phrases like “QA Engineer” and “Tester” interchangeably. It’s convenient to do so, and generally innocuous — but this is narrow thinking. To think of Quality Assurance as “testing” is reductive; it puts a governor on the value-add of your QA team.
Testing is a skill, not a job. Instead, think of QA as the art of asking unasked questions. Testing is only one way to do this. It’s a coincidence that “QA” could also represent “Question Asker”, but it’s a meaningful coincidence.
He lists three types of questions to ask:
- Verification: Does X do Y?
- Discovery: What happens if…?
- Criticism: Does this make sense?
I really like this breakdown, and he includes more examples in the article. It illustrates the reality that assuring quality transcends any functional team: everyone is responsible, because everyone can and should be asking these types of questions.
As an engineer, I should to be asking verification questions throughout the development process. I’ll probably codify those questions by writing unit and end-to-end tests. Answering these questions should be the baseline before handing the work off to another team member.
But I should also be asking discovery questions to surface edge cases that need to be addressed. Some of those are apparent when writing the code, “Oo, we aren’t handling this state case”, but other times it’s based on user interaction. I need to play around a bit and look for those pitfalls.
And all the while I should ask critical questions: does this implementation make sense? Will it meet the needs of our users? What about folks on low-powered devices or those with disabilities? If the answer to those questions are unsatisfactory, then I might need to work out a different solution.
Personally, I find asking verification and criticism questions easy; it’s discovery questions that I often overlook. This article was a good framework for thinking about quality assurance and reminder that I need to play my part in the process as well.