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Tips & tricks for creating Quality Strategies

The objective of the Quality Strategy is to ensure that software products are built with quality in mind and to guide the teams and organisations through the validation processes required to deliver high-quality products.

The Quality Strategy should offer a clear overview of the team/tribe's approach to planning, assuring (building), and validating the quality of the software product throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC).

Best practices for creating Quality Strategies​

  • Use the provided templates, making sure to consider all the sections. This approach ensures that all essential aspects are considered, promoting a consistent approach to quality management across the organization.
  • All trade-offs should be captured (made explicit).
  • If any details are captured in another doc, reference the doc in the appropriate section.
  • Develop one Quality Strategy per Product, along with smaller strategies focused on individual functionalities/features.
  • Not all practices are applicable to all use cases; teams and tribes should adopt a risk-based approach to determine what practices are relevant, appropriate, and effective to mitigate the threats to their software development practices.
  • It’s essential to take time on a regular basis, not only to design the quality strategy but to review it. Analyse what the current context is, see the progress it’s making, where the team stands, and where it can aspire to go. Then you may plan to achieve the goal.

Useful tips​

  • Be concise and clear: it is recommended to use bulleted lists, checklists, and tables, which provide a structured and easily digestible format for presenting information. By avoiding long paragraphs and unnecessary detail, tribes/teams can ensure that their strategy is clear and easy to understand, reducing the risk of misinterpretation.
  • Focus on facts: Stick to the important details and avoid using excessive marketing language. Remember that the Quality Strategy is for engineers, not customers or analysts.
  • No fluff. There is no length expectation for a Quality Strategy. Bigger is not better. Focus on including information that is relevant and useful for stakeholders.
  • Write for others to understand: Remember that the Quality Strategy is intended for all stakeholders to understand, not just yourself or your team.
  • If it isn’t important, don’t put it in the strategy. Not a single word in the strategy should garner a “don’t care” reaction from a potential stakeholder.
  • Guide an engineer’s thinking. A good strategy helps anybody think through functionality and quality needs and logically leads from higher-level concepts to lower-level details that can be directly implemented.

User-Centric High-Level Software Engineering Strategy Guidelines​

Define strategies designed to prioritise the end-user at every stage of the development lifecycle:

  • Define the desired user experience
  • Translate UX into functional requirements
  • Design with technology in mind
  • Implement and test iteratively
  • Quality assurance and testing across the SDLC
  • Launch, scale, expand
  • Documentation and training
  • Measurement of success