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Aligning QA Strategy with Business Goals: An Overview

For an organization to become successful by selling their products or services, they’d need to ensure that their products/services are of great quality. Enterprises are keen on observing trends that help them improve the quality and speed of their products/services. This is why they need great QA and software testing strategies.

However, for these strategies to grant benefits to an organization, they should be aligned with the organization’s business goals which is easier said than done.

The first step is to develop an actionable QA strategy itself.

Developing the strategy

The concept is similar to what the marketing and finance department does in an organization. They always find a way to devise appropriate strategies that tie to the organization’s larger business goals. A QA strategy can be developed the same way. However, the software development team should be involved as well to understand the actionable potential of the strategy better.

Why align QA strategy with business goals

Many organizations do not take QA strategies into account when planning to determine an optimal approach to achieving the business goals. The QA process itself might not be given the priority it deserves. To improve the product quality, simply facilitating QA and testing aren’t enough. The team involved with the product should be able to understand the tangible value in investing the organization’s resources in QA. This would help the team define QA goals that correlate with the business goals.

Figuring out the right goals

Not all organizations have established or at least transparent business goals. If the QA team is to align their goals with the business goals, they will need to get input from the various stakeholders across the organization. This also helps the QA team understand how product quality impacts the success of the business. The key is to understand the high-level goals. The QA team can then work backwards to devise a strategy that aligns with the high level goals.

Challenges to know about

Tying QA strategy to business goals isn’t going to be easy. Even the nature of the people involved can give the QA team a hard time. Another major challenge for the team is to ensure that the QA goals are quantifiable. The company should decide which metrics are linked to their business’ success, and the QA goals are created based on these chosen success metrics.

Conclusion

The software development company should be willing to invest time and resources into creating a QA plan that would contribute to the success of the company by improving product/service quality. This is the only effective way to benefit from QA. If the company is simply not willing to invest in a good QA plan, they will start running out of steam in the long run.

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