When is it the appropriate time for QA? Who is responsible for quality when working in such a small team?

Question

Lizzy Masotta · Accepted Answer

Work in the open. Create a culture on your team that encourages sharing unfinished work and working live together. This will drive the highest quality bar for your team. If you wait until the end of development to QA too many problems will be compounded.

Some rituals I use to encourage a high quality b ar throughout the entire product development lifecycle:

1. Fresh Eyes - Once a week anyone in the Product Squad can demo unfinished work for the purpose of getting feedback mid-build. The phrase and concept of “Fresh Eyes” comes from Shopify - it’s part of their culture to value feedback throughout development and actively seek it.
 2. Weekly Demos - Every Friday anyone in the Product Squad can demo near complete work (PM, UX, Eng, Data). The purpose here is to celebrate progress and create a shared understanding of what the product will be. There can be great feedback that comes in these sessions, but typically more minor edits around design elements (padding, text, etc) vs fundamental functionality changes.
 3. Journey Checking - All too often, I’ve seen great product visions and phenomenal products not live up to the dream. When work gets broken up into bits and pieces for engineering you easily lose sight of the journeys. It is the job of the PM to define and educate the group on the key personas and journeys they will take in the product. In the weekly demos, the PM should choose one journey every week to show where you’re at with it. Individual bits may work in isolated demos, but when you string a journey together you will quickly find a lot more gaps and issues.
 4. Prototype as Requirements - The UX prototype is a living, breathing requirements document that provides incredible detail beyond what a written doc could. This is the bar that is referenced and should be actively referenced by eng as they’re building. Things that cannot easily be seen in a prototype should be written as requirements by PM.

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