“Transparency, Humility, Enthusiasm, Impact-Orientation, and Ownership. These are very admirable values, but they seem much more about how to live than how to run an organization. And they seem to have very little to do with your product. Why did you pick them?”
An investor recently asked me this question.
At ProdPerfect, we’ve chosen these company values because they fight burnout within our organization, within the QA teams we serve, and in the world around us.
Our Company Mission: Fighting Burnout
We designed our company values explicitly around our core mission of fighting burnout. We want to fight burnout for both our customers and our own team. When organizations neglect these values, eventual burnout becomes inevitable:
- Without organizational transparency, teams lack an understanding of the facts and reasoning behind big decisions, and may not fully trust leadership, creating an atmosphere that breeds anxiety and resentment, contributing to employee burnout.
- Without humility, employees are likely to spend emotional energy bickering, fighting, and playing politics, leading also to burnout.
- Without enthusiasm, work becomes a grind or drudgery, and employees spend time at work preferring to be elsewhere, contributing to burnout.
- Without connecting the impact of their work to the mission of the organization or the welfare of others, individuals default to believing that their role does not have intrinsic value, contributing to burnout.
- Without clear ownership of KPIs or problems, people easily become confused, problems persist, and frustration arises. When employees don’t feel that their area of ownership is respected, they feel helpless, and they may develop resentment. Each of these experiences contributes to burnout.
We continually strive internally to fight burnout by individually cultivating, and collectively teaching, reinforcing, and celebrating transparency, humility, enthusiasm, impact-orientation, and ownership. Holding to these values makes for a much more delightful, fulfilling, and productive workplace.
But, beyond our internal organization, how does ProdPerfect’s QA automation service fight burnout? How does it help other businesses adopt and reap the benefits of our values?
ProdPerfect QA Automation as Organizational Transformer
When ambitious, forward-thinking organizations partner with us, they are able to break through barriers to excellence that are a direct result of the core dysfunctions of legacy software quality assurance. ProdPerfect helps our clients reach further towards each of these values, decreasing burnout common to the conventional state of a software organization.
Transparency: In conventional QA testing, there is little clarity to the software organization as to which tests have been developed or why. Teams of similar sizes can have a few dozen end-to-end tests or thousands of them. What ultimately drives this? It’s unclear. This creates frustration for the developers whose code is being tested, and a lack of alignment between developers and QA engineers. Cross-silo fighting often results.
With ProdPerfect, data exclusively drives what the machine identifies as important to test. It’s clear that each test case reflects a pattern that users perform frequently, and teams can see exactly how frequently users interact with patterns that do and don’t have test cases in the ProdPerfect suite. Testing decisions become extremely transparent and there is less room for argument.
Humility: In conventional testing, intuition drives the decisions around what to test. The industry has for decades asked QA automation engineers to get in a room with some excel sheets and come up with what’s important to test. Sometimes the product team helps, sometimes developers help, and sometimes product analytics helps. But ultimately these decisions are made by people’s intuitions and they become attached to them. When bugs are missed, egos come out to play. “Why wasn’t this covered?” is the conversation every QA lead dreads, but must frequently face. When this question is asked, people get defensive, justifying their decisions. By its design, this system fails the people involved.
Because ProdPerfect’s test suite is objectively built off of data, there are no egos involved. The tests exist because users told us that these workflows are important to them. If a bug is caught, great. If a bug makes it into production, we can know that the facts told us it wasn’t worth the maintenance resources or test runtime (see: testing pyramid) to build a test for it. No room for ego.
Enthusiasm: Who loves maintaining end-to-end test suites? Who loves chasing down and diagnosing a flaky or unstable test? That’s right, nobody. ProdPerfect means machines take that burden away from humans, and so they can move on to work that deserves more enthusiastic attention.
Impact: Because of the intuitive nature of conventional test case development, it’s impossible to know if the test you’re writing has a large impact, a small impact, or zero impact. You might be writing tests that cover a pattern of behavior that nobody will ever use on your application, and you know that.
ProdPerfect’s data focus means every test is impactful. No longer are engineers spending time writing tests that have little or no value to the software organization. That waste has been removed.
Ownership: Who owns quality? Is it QA, or developers? Is it both? How often do these two departments fight back and forth over who is responsible for which area of quality, and how often do they fight over who has the power to make decisions about quality? When a bug is found in an end-of-sprint regression cycle, who is responsible for hunting it and fixing it? In many organizations, the relationship between software developers and QA engineers is quite toxic, and it’s because their ownership seems to overlap, with neither being clear what they have full ownership of and control over.
With ProdPerfect deployed, we can get part of the way towards clarifying that question. https://prodperfect.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/breaking-2-min.jpegs should own their own unit and integration tests over the parts of the application they write. ProdPerfect will own testing the application as a whole: with each build, developers will get objective feedback about whether they broke the application. If they did, they own fixing their code, and have the power, tools, and context to do so. QA can continue supporting in many other realms: from other forms of testing to serving as analysts and advisers to developers to help them write quality code from square one.
Ultimately, software development and QA testers or engineers are set up for a frustrating relationship in the old model. Most experienced engineering leaders reading this will recognize elements of the above from their past, and most are likely familiar with toxic or dysfunctional developer/QA relations. By breaking that wheel of ineffective, unclear, intuition-based testing and mutual antipathy between these two groups, we enable a transformation towards a much healthier, more productive, and less burnt-out organization.
We exist as an organization because we wanted to bring something into the world that would help us and others further what we find most important. With our team, our investors, and our partners, we will strive to help all of us to avoid burnout, and thereby to thrive.