Develop the mindset and practical coaching techniques that help teams build shared responsibility for continuous quality

The good, the bad, the ugly

Focusing on balanced outcomes, not just output

A quality narrative is a qualitative report, expressed in words, on how good something is. It allows us to communicate a more in depth and thorough understanding of a topic. Think of it as a statement or conversation that really focuses on the what: What have I tested? I looked at the /puppies endpoint to pull back and edit a list of the puppies in the database using GET, POST, PUT and DELETE commands with valid JSON and different data. What did I see? The different request types all looked good and worked with expected payloads, however when I used special characters in any field I got a 500 error response. What does this mean? If we have any users with double barrelled puppy names, or honourifics in names like Mr. Fluffy-Bottom then they’ll get errors back from the system. What should we do? Is this something we want to fix? I can raise a bug for that. or if we want to know more about it I can test around this some more today.

A quality narrative is about the way that we can talk about quality holistically. It's a good replacement for, say, a test report. A report usually is like a condensed view of the world that sort of tries to compress down into numbers or a graph or really salient points to go cool. Like here's your parcel fail criteria. Like here's what we found as a result of something. Whereas a narrative is more of a communication around quality. What's the good, what's the bad, and what's the ugly? We sometimes talk about a quality narrative when we're doing debriefs and exploratory testing. So a quality narrative is just a slightly more open, a more wider way of communicating what we what we know about something to help inform divisions and build influence on quality as well.

Discover how “good enough,” honesty, and a clear quality narrative help teams care more and make better decisions.

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