Maximizing Product Excellence With Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance is often linked to risk mitigation. When a digital product comes to market, backed by an industry-leading brand, users shape their expectations before the product even reaches their hands. What if product leaders reframed what we see as risk—and considered that one of the biggests risks for your digital product may not be technical failure, but a failure to meet its full potential?

There are a lot of misconceptions about the practice of Quality Assurance. They range from how to define the practice fundamentally and when we engage in the product development lifecycle to how essential the QA team is to great product development.

We sat down to address some of these misconceptions and share how our QA team is core to the exceptional products we bring to market.

Beyond testing: part and parcel of realizing the product vision

For many product teams, QA is considered the final step before product release. We see the role of QA differently—at Work & Co, the QA team is integrated early and throughout the development process.

We believe that Product Management, Design, Engineering, and Quality Assurance are all equally responsible for realizing a client's vision. Leading our QA team to collaborate closely with every department to assess and enhance quality and ensure that we collectively deliver the best possible product to the market.

So what does this look like in practice?

• Product Management: From RFP, the QA team helps inform scope and resourcing needs and ensures the Statement of Work is aligned with the overall testing plan.
• Design: From conception to detailed design, the QA team helps pinpoint user experience issues, identify visual bugs, and suggest accessibility improvements.
• Engineering: Through continuous delivery, pair testing, automation, and seamless integration, the QA team helps optimize product development workflows.

Through collaborative efforts across these disciplines, the QA team ensures coherence throughout all phases of product development, facilitates an efficient process, and delivers an exceptional final product.

QA as a driver of innovation

When QA teams are charged solely with debugging, there’s a missed opportunity to leverage the discipline for creative thinking. With their collective understanding of the ins and outs of every facet of the product, the QA team is uniquely positioned to ask “Is there a better way of doing this?” Asking this question has prompted us to develop innovative new approaches to our craft, like automated testing solutions for mobile and web platforms, and data-driven issue tracking tools to pinpoint bottlenecks and guide development choices.

One example of our team’s innovative spirit is our recent work on an ambitious AI-powered conversational experience. For this project, QA needed to simulate the questions users are likely to ask and generate AI responses using a bespoke data library. Adding complexity to this process is the fact that the bot is built upon a robust framework of REST APIs. To address these challenges, our team crafted Python scripts to generate AI chatbot responses, run test comparisons on new features added to the REST APIs, and created integration testing scripts to ensure seamless connectivity between all chatbot endpoints.

When the QA team’s ingenuity is nurtured, product teams maintain the high standards they’re accustomed to and are better supported to take on new market demands and challenges. This recently came into play when our longtime client Gatorade stepped into new brand territory with drops of celebrity product collaborations. It was the first time both Gatorade and our team had been challenged to test different product states—from pre-launch, to in-flight, and post-sell out—in real time. Having worked through this, we’ve sharpened our QA team’s ability to support dynamic E-commerce experiences within critical windows of time and reinforced our ability to innovate in the moment.

Is automation the future of QA?

AI has revolutionized the QA practice by enabling the rapid execution and automation of repetitive tasks and handling of large data sets. This naturally raises the question: Will AI render QA obsolete? While AI serves as a valuable tool for certain aspects of QA, and we've successfully experimented with it in our practice, human-driven Quality Assurance remains essential.

Here are three of the main reasons why human-centric QA is here to stay:

Our bar for quality is unmatched: AI lacks the ability to make nuanced judgments that help differentiate between good and exceptional product development. Our QA team utilizes their expertise and perceptiveness to elevate each aspect of the product, ensuring that the whole product exceeds expectations.

QA is a marriage of soft and technical skills: Our QA team’s true force is unlocked when our interpersonal skills, like the power to persuade and earn the trust of stakeholders, combine with our deep technical knowledge. We’re a diverse group of critical thinkers who question assumptions, incorporating our learnings into product iterations.

Competitive edge: AI is a valuable tool for the rapid execution and automation of repetitive tasks with large data sets, but the technology stumbles when tasked with the type of big picture thinking that our QA team excels at to ensure a competitive product advantage.

With every test we run, in the back of our minds, we’re asking: is our proposed solution and execution aligned with the product purpose and intent? This is a core to Work & Co’s product development philosophy. In acceptance testing, we’re not simply asking if the digital product meets the user's needs, we’re asking: how does this exceed their expectations? How does this provide distinct value from what’s already on the market? In end-to-end testing, we’re asking: how does each component within the product ecosystem function, and how does it function alongside related products that are already part of the brand universe?

Values that define our practice

Our experience over the last decade shaped our core beliefs about Quality Assurance and its critical role in product development. We believe:

• That curiosity yields quality: For many of us, our curiosity about the way things work is what lead us into our field. We channel this innate curiosity into a company-wide culture of continuous learning. Through experimentation, project shares, mentorship, and internal workshops our team is encouraged and empowered to learn new concepts. By continually enhancing our capabilities we are more equipped to identify the root causes of defects, analyze and test complex systems, and help our clients overcome new and existing challenges.

• That excellence is a daily practice: Quality is the sum of hundreds and thousands of cumulative decisions and actions over the course of the product development lifecycle— quality isn’t something that can be achieved in one sprint, or a box in a pre-flight checklist. Our QA team applies the same rigor to early prototypes as we do to the final, consumer-facing product.

• In people over processes: The best product outcomes happen when structure and autonomy converge. If our QA process unearths contradictions to some of our earlier hypotheses, our team is empowered to raise this to the wider product team— wherever in the development lifecycle we may be. We always want the best possible product out in the world.

A great QA team is one of the best kept secrets in product development. Next time you’re building QA into your product timeline, don’t underestimate how involving the QA team early and often can impact your product’s success.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Work & Co’s QA practice can improve your digital product reach out to newbiz@work.co. If you’re a QA professional curious about how Work & Co can support your career, connect with us at careers@work.co.