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Meetings

QA team meeting philosophy​

  • Time and brainpower are the most important resources we manage as a QA team, because they are fundamental and finite. Where we spend our time and mental energy will determine what outcomes we can achieve.
  • It's important for the QA team to attend meetings. We add value. We receive value. We bond with other folks on the team.
  • It's important for the QA team to not go to meetings. Heads-down independent work is the time when we find bugs, improve processes, come up with novel testing strategies, etc.

Meeting review​

Periodically re-evaluating which meetings we attend generally and who goes to each meeting specifically helps us to avoid over-spending time on meetings and to play to the strengths of individuals on the team. (Individuals can always talk with the team or their manager if they have changes they want to make to their own meeting workoad. The overall review process is meant as a backstop to look at everything holistically on a semi-regular basis.)

The goals of review are:

  • For each individual on the team to be happy about the meetings they're attending. Ideally, everyone feels like they're going to the meetings where they give or receive the most value, or that match the best with their goals and skills.
  • For the team overall to be attending meetings efficiently. Ideally, we're spending just enough time in meetings to meet our individual and team objectives, but no more than that. This could involve sending a representative (instead of multiple members of the team), keeping a recurring meeting on our calendar but only going when certain conditions are met, etc.

Inhale and exhale​

To gain the same value out of meetings while each person attends fewer meetings requires a shared set of expectations for the sole QA representative attending any given meeting.

Our expectations are that representatives will pay attention at the meeting (inhale) and share necessary information with the full team in our Slack channel (exhale). Examples of information we'd expect to share:

  • Times you spoke up in a meeting

    “I had a lot of questions about how they’re going to implement the calendar feature for appointments, seems like there’s a lot of accessibility things to figure out there still.”

  • Things the whole team needs to know to do our jobs
    • “We're pausing all work on this feature. Hold off on writing test plans for the areas we assigned out last week, until further notice."
  • When you’re sensing a problem, or if there’s something to keep an eye out for

    “My first round of testing for the migration turned up way more issues than we expected. I confirmed changes with the testing plan with Eng and Product at the feature check-in, and the rest of the team can expect a meeting invitation to get up to speed (so you can also start testing) sometime this week."