In our Agile Testing Days talk, Naomi Fleisher and I shared myths, realities, and the tools that helped us as new quality leaders. Here’s a companion resource with practical tools and frameworks that didn’t fit in the talk - a curated list to guide you through your first 90 days.
Mission (North Star Example)
Lead with a vision of quality that accelerates delivery, improves reliability, and empowers teams to build products that delight customers quickly and with confidence.
First 30 Days – Learn & Connect
Focus: Understand context, culture, and quality ecosystem.
Strategic Onboarding
- Review current QA and automation landscape: frameworks, pipelines, metrics, and challenges.
- Audit test coverage, environments, and release processes.
- Identify stakeholders in engineering, product, and operations.
- Understand company objectives, product priorities, and how quality impacts business success.
- Understand how success is measured in your organisation
Knowledge Building
- Learn how teams collaborate and make release decisions.
- Review product documentation, test strategies, and incident history.
- Familiarize with technical stack and tools supporting testing and CI/CD.
- Understand how AI and automation support productivity and quality.
Relationship Building
- Meet with engineering managers, product leads, and other department heads.
- Listen to pain points around quality, release confidence, and delivery.
- Establish credibility as a collaborator and problem solver.
31–60 Days – Engage & Contribute
Focus: Influence, improve, and implement early wins.
Strategic & Operational Impact
- Identify and implement quick wins (e.g., improved CI stability, automation coverage, or reporting clarity).
- Begin defining a Quality Strategy roadmap — outlining focus areas, goals, and metrics.
- Introduce test coverage awareness in sprint planning and pre-release checklists.
- Partner with DevOps to understand and improve test environment reliability.
Deepen Knowledge
Analyze defect trends, build failures, and release bottlenecks to identify systemic issues.
- Learn what matters most to the business and product teams — reliability, user trust, speed to market.
- Deepend the knowledge and understanding on the business domain and the product offerings.
- Observe how developers and QA collaborate and where enablement is most needed.
Relationships
- Strengthen partnerships with engineering leadership.
- Begin influencing sprint and release processes to better integrate quality.
- Communicate early wins and insights to stakeholders.
61–90 Days – Deliver & Scale
Focus: Establish scalable practices, metrics, and leadership impact.
Strategic Delivery
- Finalize and socialize the Quality & Automation Roadmap aligned with product goals.
- Define key quality metrics (coverage, defect trends, pass rates, etc.) and integrate into reporting dashboards.
- Develop or refine CI/CD and automation strategy for sustainable execution.
- Introduce a framework for developer participation in quality (ex. shared test ownership or quality champions).
Leadership & Culture
- Mentor and guide QA and automation engineers.
- Lead discussions on continuous improvement and retrospective learnings.
- Be recognized as a trusted leader who drives both quality outcomes and team growth.
Guiding Principles
- Lead through collaboration: Quality is everyone’s responsibility.
- Build sustainably: Focus on scalable automation and maintainable frameworks.
- Empower teams: Provide tools, processes, and visibility for quality success.
- Measure what matters: Data-driven insights guide continuous improvement.
- Champion confidence: Every release should strengthen trust internally and externally.
