The QA architecture handbook: Guide for building a quality-first culture

This short guide provides a structured framework and practical advice for building a rock-solid, end-to-end QA architecture in an organization.

This handbook is designed to assist you, whether you are beginning to develop your QA processes, or you're seeking to enhance your current practices, by outlining the key steps and important factors to consider.

Note: This is not a QA personal growth roadmap type handbook. For that, please refer to the rather widely used QA roadmap for topics that can be improved in terms of personal QA growth.

Core philosophy

Before exploring the details, it is essential to recognize a key principle: Quality is not exclusively the duty of the QA team; rather, it is a collective responsibility that encompasses all teams and individuals engaged in the software development process.

This handbook aims to assist you in cultivating a quality-first culture, empowering everyone to play a role in delivering outstanding products.

Four pillars of a QA architecture

We will explore the journey of creating a solid QA architecture through four key pillars that are closely linked:

• Culture foundation: Fostering a quality culture; establishing a quality-first mindset and creating vital planning processes to support it.
• Core infrastructure: Continuous deployments, continuous monitoring and early issues detection; developing a strong infrastructure for ongoing monitoring, proactive identification of issues, and ensuring security.
• Automations: We should scale our confidence by deploying a thorough range of automated processes and tests to guarantee processes and code quality, functionality, and performance.
• Exploratory and manual testing: Now the human element, utilizing human insight, creativity, and feedback from real users to identify problems and enhance the overall user experience.

Sections & Resources

• Go to Section 1: Culture foundation - cultivating a quality culture
• Go to Section 2: Core infrastructure - monitoring and early detection
• Go to Section 3: Automations - building confidence at scale
• Go to Section 4: Exploratory and manual testing - the human touch

Contribution and style guidelines

Your contributions to this handbook are highly appreciated. To ensure consistency and readability, we created a set of guidelines. Please refer to the Contribution and style guidelines for more details.

License

This handbook is licensed under the MIT License. Feel free to use, share, and modify it according to your needs.