Adopting the Hybrid Habit for Agile Quality Assurance (QA) - Part 1

Today's enterprises are constantly looking to maximize benefits reaped from their Quality Assurance (QA) function, both on speed and costs. This is easier said than done. Today's QA industry is volatile and success in such a landscape is defined by how quickly an organization is able to seamlessly adapt. Organizations need to ensure that their multiyear QA strategies withstand upcoming disruptive technology and consumer trends.

Let's rewind to a few years back…

Traditionally, QA teams were aligned to lines of businesses or Business Verticals - a decentralized operating mode. However, as IT priorities shifted to having the customer 'at the core of everything', the role of QA took on a strategic nature and the concept of a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) was born. TCoEs offered a string of benefits including process standardization, reusable domain centric templates and accelerators and incubation and development of specialized QA competencies.

The disruptive onset of digital however, has exposed the TCoE model. The flexibility and complete independence from lines of businesses / business verticals clashes with the scrum team powered Agile development way. Organizations are looking again at the decentralized QA model, however the older drawbacks of the model have not disappeared.

Understanding the drawbacks:

To better understand how to address this challenge, let's compare the pros and cons of the Centralized and Decentralized models. These have been broadly classified into 5 major themes - Governance, Center of Excellence (CoE), Delivery, and centralized repository and cost.

Adopting the Hybrid Habit for Agile Quality Assurance (QA) - Part 1

The Solution: Hybrid Operating Model

The solution to this dilemma is to have a model that integrates the best of both the centralized TCoE and the decentralized agile model: a hybrid operating model. This model would comprise the beneficial horizontal governance components of the TCoE approach and the vertical governance processes from the decentralized approach.

The hybrid operating model would be in the form of an Inverted T having two major components:

Decentralized Project Delivery: The Project management cycle and decisions regarding project delivery would take place at LOB level. From requirement understanding to Sprint Planning, ST, SIT design and execution, defect management will all occur at the individual project/LOB level. The projects are free to choose the processes, checklists and the costs on project basis.
Centralized Service Delivery: For specialized services, there is a Centralized Service delivery where LOBs can request for on-demand services like Environment Provisioning, Application Deployment, Test Data Management, Test Automation & Maintenance, Regression Testing, Performance, Digital, Mobile and Security. It will also include a layer of Enablers like Knowledge Management, Competency Management and a common repository for scripts, trainings and frameworks.

About the Author

Rupali Agarwal is a Consultant with Test Advisory Services (TAS) in Wipro. She is currently instrumental in conducting QA assessments for test consulting engagements and also contributes to thought leadership. She has an overall experience of 4+ years and has worked extensively across different phases of software development lifecycle. After completing Engineering in IT from BIT Mesra, Rupali worked with TCS for two years and then went on to pursue an MBA from Symbiosis. Rupali enjoys playing sports like basketball, badminton, likes reading and listening to music in her leisure time.

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