How can we get more quality out of QA and move faster? Stop dumping your problems on them and put the responsibility on the appriopriate parties - the developers.
People regard QA as the defenders of Production. In an ideal world they prevent bugs from being released, but reality shows us otherwise. We find bugs in software even after QA is done, so what is QA preventing? They are preventing developers from taking responsibility for their code.
When working in accelerating projects, the development process and feature sets overrun QA with more and more work. Often the solution is to get more QA, but this does not improve the product nor improve efficiency.
It's a complicated and long process to go back and forth between developer and QA. I would rather ask a developer, along with the person who defined the scope of work, to ensure a feature is working properly. After all, they are the ones who know the work and can fix the issues immediately.
Making developers responsible for fixing any issues in a release or development process, gives them the means and the motivation to be responsible for quality, something that is not available to the QA team. Let's give developers the authority to say this is ready to go to Production, not QA - after all developers working with Product Managers know when something is completed.
In the future, we will explore how to change the QA role to be more effective in the modern environment of faster release processes. For more information on the development process, take a look at our other articles.
