How Quality Coaches Influence the Transition to Quality Engineering 

Testing used to be considered as separate role and function “testing is finding anomalies in the software once the development phase is over“, and little by little, the trend is shifting towards testing as a team activity.  

Quality engineering is a much more holistic view of quality than testing, it’s about building quality products from the start “Build-in Quality“.   

It’s about building the right thing at the right time and with the right level of quality.   

As per the famous saying “quality is a whole team’s responsibility” which explains that the effort of every team member is required to contribute in the shift to quality engineering.  

In today’s organizations, we talk about the evolution towards quality. Testing as a role This expertise is still present in many companies, but the change is in the way we perceive quality as a whole.  

This is where we talk about Quality Coaching, and the presence of this role that aims to help in this transition within teams and organizations.  

So instead of focusing on what to test or how to make sure we’ve built the right things, we focus on introducing quality earlier and it’s also important to have a discussion on the topic at the beginning and continuously, in other words we try to involve the teams instead of dictating what we want to do!   

It’s also about creating a culture in which we build things right.   

Let’s explain what a Quality Coach is? 

A Quality Coach is a role that challenges and actively supports a team or an organization to build a quality collaborative approach toward quality, through:  

• Coaching (individual or collective)  
• Facilitation (workshops, rituals, visual facilitation, etc.)  
• Training (or awareness-raising)  
•  Mentoring (especially with beginners or those in difficulty)  

The quality coach can also contribute with his various skills in risk identification, critical thinking, active listening, etc.   

In future blogs series, I’ll give example of tools that you can use in your quality coaching, I’ll also share the benefits with some practical examples, then I’ll raise the questions that triggered me about future challenges a quality coach can encounter in the future (like dealing with AI ..)