How do you communicate confidence in quality to those outside QE, when the confidence is beyond just the correctness of what was built?

This question is taken from the AMA about quality beyond correctness, and comes from Gary Hawkes.

There are a few things which could be helpful to think about when communicating confidence in quality beyond correctness:

We could start by thinking about who we want to communicate with, and what matters to them.  Which real-world risks would they find most impactful or scary?  What would make them perk up and listen?  Whether risks have been mitigated, reduced, or still remain, thinking in this direction should help us demonstrate why someone should care about the quality beyond correctness, and the efforts to work towards it.  By bringing in the prioritised characteristics of the product / project, we can highlight points which might not have been specified in the requirements, but still play an important role in quality and the aspects we agreed were important.

As a concrete example, we might have a checkout feature of a shopping website.  Everything technically works, but the processing time of card details is noticeable.  There were no performance requirements on the tickets / work items, but during testing, we found that the pause caused us concern.  Are the details being processed?  Is there something wrong?  Should I refresh the page?  Or if the time is really long, should I even abandon the process and close the window?  Refreshing the page could cause the payment to be processed twice, and closing the page may cause payment to be taken, but the order to not go through.  Both of these cases are risks which would result in customer complaints, lost trust, and potentially extra charges and / or expenses to the company for having to correct the issues.  This should be easier for someone outside of a QE role, such as a Product Owner or Marketing Lead to understand, and make decisions based on this.

Thanks for your question, Gary!

Find all the questions and answers to this AMA in the AMA About Quality Beyond Correctness collection.