# [[Facilitating a quality practices assessment]] conference:: [[Agile Testing Days 2023]] speaker:: [[Janet Gregory]] ## Summary ## Log Janet - Lives in Canada most of the year, but she's a snowbird - Agile Testing series of books, with [[Lisa Crispin]] - [[Selena Delesie]] and Janet are working on QPAM (Quality Practices Assessment Model) Facilitating - Leading or moderating a discussion QPAM - Assess against ten quality aspects - (Social aspects) - Feedback loops - Culture - Learning and improvement - Development approach - Quality and test ownership - Testing breadth - Code quality and technical debt - Test automation and tools - Deployment pipeline - Defect management ### Four dimensions (not a maturity model-- it's a starting point for where teams are) - Beginning - Unifying - Practicing - Innovating ### Facilitating an assessment 1. Preparing 2. Gathering information 3. Conducting 4. Evaluating 5. Self-assessing 6. Reporting #### Preparing to do an assessment - Remotely vs in-person? - Remotely needs to be a bit more structured - Are you using an external facilitator? - Self-assessment by the team? Internal assessment? External assessment? #### Information - Prospect retrospective - a timeline with their activities - Observing meetings, workshops - Group and individual interviews #### Conducting an assessment 1. Start with a process retrospective 2. Observe some of the working sessions 3. Based on your observations, set up group and individual interviews 4. Examine artifacts that help your understanding Safety and trust are key. Process retrospective - Everyone in the team + others who may be involved in delivery - Start with timeline: New idea to released - What happens when? It's about observing, listening, and asking questions. - How do they do their work? - Taking notes is essential. Take notes on what you saw, questions to follow up on, what you heard them say. Analyzing - Highlight examples and patterns you saw, and match them to the behaviours in the model. - Look for big patterns #### Evaluating - Look at practices and rate the team on those dimensions (weighted) - Formulate report - Self-assessing - Full assessment (starting with process retrospective) - Partial assessment on a regular basis #### Reporting - Transparency about process and observations (while keeping safety of the team by anonymising data) - Summary of reports via radar chart - Recommendations (up to 10) + suggestions ### Benefits - Consistent message for team so they can decide where to improve and how - Method agnostic (though it works well for [[Agile]] teams) - [!] This is Janet's very last talk in person! 70th birthday next week. ## Next Actions