AMA answer: As you coach engineers through with quality assistance model, are there any milestones you need to hit to raise the bar on the wider team taking more responsibility for quality?

Great question from Gary Hawkes on transitioning to Quality Assistance model.

I was thinking a lot how to answer this question. I think it's very important the team is mature enough to own testing/quality as part of their delivery. What I mean by that is there isn't this mental model "we develop, they test", but more like "we deliver feature, story e2e - from planning to production release and monitoring". There is willingness to work with ambiguities, do things beyond job spec, be self-sufficient either it's a developer or QA, be very proactive, advocate for right things and push back on ineffective ones.

I also think you would need (if you don't have it yet), a strong platform capabilities to enable "QAs assist" ways of working. You wound't like to have quality assistance model if there isn't enough tools, practices, principles in place how to do testing/automation, etc. You can build it of course, QA team should work towards that every day to create structure, consistency and reduce confusion once they enable devs to test.

QA team should be confidence enough to drive the change and not be driven. QAs in quality assistance model work as consultants, they advice the team, spot gaps, bring solutions, provide tools, work on innovations. Eventually, they can transform themselves into enablement team that works across organisation holistically while value steam teams develop, test, fix and deliver features themselves.

Your milestones will be getting that maturity into the team. You can possibly asses it already - do you need to chase people or things are getting done? Do people see gaps, problems, bring solutions or just happy to execute a task? I think that level of maturity enables quality assistance, else it can be counterproductive.