Everyone wants to do faster & better QA/testing.
Is it embracing modern tools?
Is it improving the process?
Is it enhancing the practice?
Improve process or enhance practice – which is better?
While in discussions with a senior management professional of a software product company, he said, they have a great QA & Dev team but wanted to enhance their maturity to improve quality, speed and productivity.
When outlining the approach, to strengthen their QA practice he voiced his concern- “you know we have a process and am not really keen on changing the process, so am unsure how we can benefit from you”. That’s when this turned out to be an interesting conversation, to help him understand the difference between process and practice.
So, what’s a process? A process is a set of well formed activities done by folks to accomplish something. Typically in the realm of organizational governance, it is something that helps an organization how to do certain common things, to agree upon what, who, when to do so that we can do them repeatedly, consistently and deliver meaningful and good outcomes. These may be done only by humans or aided/done by tools. A process is about “what, when & who” of activities so that we may do well consistently- good organisational governance.
On the other hand practice is very personal, it is about the individual not the organization. It is about ‘how’ an individual does – the way he/she looks at a problem, analyzes, understands, observes, designs solution and implements the same. It is a set of techniques, principles, heuristics & guidelines, a method/methodology really, that a person uses to think and solve problems along with a process enabling good implementation of the solution well.
| Process | Practice |
| Organization centric | Individual centric |
| Focus on consistency, repeatability, a common-ness | Focus on performance (effectiveness, efficiency), pique individual uniqueness |
| Enable a common/standard way of doing things | Enable individual abilities to surface to add depth, experience |
| Helps to scaling teams well | Harder to scale |
| Focus on how to do more | Enables how to do less |
| Aids like templates, checklists etc are useful in process implementation | Aids like personal cheatsheets are useful here |
| Activities may be done by human or by a tool | More often it is human assisted by tools |
| Activities are standardised, well scripted and more often repetitive | Really unscripted, does not mean random though, done based on context. A good practice flows well, morphs, adapts, adjusts, course corrects constantly. If well done, it is immersive. |
| Clear and visible measurements done more commonly analysed after completion of activities to figure out how well done, what can be done better. | Measures more often ubiquitous, done in-situ helps in continuous adjustment, course correction rather than collect and analyse later. |
Process is at a higher level, at organizational level, whereas practice is individualistic – of how various elements of process are done. So when you want to improve, to deliver something better, of higher quality, of being cheaper, you can obviously improve the process to find out activities that could be done better, cut out some activities that don’t add value, speed up some activities, provide better aids/templates to help and change/adjust the responsibilities and use software tools.
You can also improve the practice, which is basically enabling an individual to think better and therefore solve problems well.
It is about equipping an individual with “thinking tools”, these really are techniques, principles, guidelines and heuristics. Good packaging of these “thinking tools” is what a methodology is and practice is about “installing methodology”.
So it’s not just about doing something at a higher level and commonly for all i.e. process, but about enabling an individual to be able to do much better, faster & cheaper. Practice is very personal and I’m sure that if you have played sports you know the importance of building a practice implies the repetition of say techniques, so that it forms a habit.
Maybe you have read popular book “Atomic habits” that talks about how great habits can play a key role to personal improvement and professional work too.
So when we talk about smart QA and enablement using a “HyBIST”(Hypothesis Based Immersive Session Testing), it’s about enabling an QA/Test/Dev to do better with a superior personal practice. It is important to note that organisational process should not hinder a good practice of the individual hence those parts of process may have to be factored.
Now the gentleman understood the key differences between “Process & Practice” and appreciated the power of methodology to enhance intellectual practice of an individual.
Practice = Problem solving techniques : Individual Intellect
Process = Solution implementation : Organisational Governance
Until then mull over “Process & Practice”. What you think? Which is better? What is the role of tools?