The Quality Coach: A true Swiss army knife
Speaker
Target Audience
Basic (no prior knowledge)
Description
The first principle of Agile is delivering customer value, but this requires both strong development and quality engineering skills within the team. Quality engineering goes beyond testing—it focuses on building quality throughout the entire lifecycle, from identifying business needs to delivering solutions into production. However, many agile teams lack the necessary quality skillset, especially as dedicated QA roles are increasingly absent. This raises the question of how teams can adopt and sustain a quality engineering mindset.
A new role has emerged to address this challenge: the quality coach. As defined by Ann Marie Charette, a quality coach guides, supports, and rallies teams to collectively own and improve quality through facilitation, education, experimentation, and visualization. The quality coach helps teams assess their quality maturity, develop testing and quality skills, and foster a strong quality culture. They also advocate for quality across teams, management, and the business to ensure sustainable delivery of high-quality solutions aligned with Agile principles.
You will learn
To understand what a Quality Coach is – and is not
To shift from testing to Quality Engineering – from a practical view
Which tools to use to strengthen quality ownership inside agile teams