Recently I sat in a QA team meeting where half of the QA staff was questioning the “usefulness” of the QA Test Plan, which was a more generic long term plan, and suggesting a plan geared toward the current phase of the company which is in a start-up “get a few key customers interested” phase. Half of the QA team wanted to be more involved in hearing and learning about the key customers’ issues. They wanted to develop the test plan more around the current “key customers” and worry about the future once these customers were satisfied. The other half of the team was pretty quiet – neither agreeing or disagreeing with the manager who felt that it was best to start developing the QA department in a way that is geared toward long-term plans, and let project managers and tech support deal with the current key customers.
Both arguments are valid, but unfortunately, the manager missed the boat on why. I think the manager believed that the QA team was concerned about the fact that bugs were found by the current key customers and that QA would be blamed for this. The manager made a point of saying that the company had never played the blame game and that QA would not be held accountable for these issues. (The company does not have any formal accountability requirements.) Therefore, the manager was comfortable with continuing on the current path of worrying about the more generic future and letting go of the current key customer specifics.
Being blamed was not even remotely the concern of the team-members who questioned the current plan. Meeting their personal accountability standards was what they were concerned about – or in a nut-shell, job satisfaction.
(more…)