Continuous quality improvement is an important goal for modern software teams. Metrics to measure quality are a perennial hot topic that people often ask me about. They’re also a perennial favorite topic for me. I am a volunteer guide for Google’s DORA community. One reason I joined it is the research DORA has done for more than ten years to find out what metrics correlate with successful, happy software teams and organizations. Please join it too, we welcome people in all roles, and our discussions usually end up being about quality!
My metrics course in Practitest’s Quality Leadership Academy
That’s a long way of saying how happy I was that the kind folks at Practitest invited me to create an online, on-demand course on using metrics to support continuous quality improvement. The course is available now, part of their Quality Leadership Academy. These free courses are aimed at testing and quality professionals who want to improve their leadership skills as well as their technical skills.
It’s hard to make an online course into a valuable learning experience. We humans learn best by talking to each other, using our hands, moving around, trying things. Just watching a video doesn’t do much for our brains.
My goal: A valuable learning experience
I had crafted an in-person workshop on a similar topic a couple of years ago with Rafael Amaral. We got terrific feedback from the enthusiastic participants, they loved the exercises. Translating in-person group exercises into individual solo exercises was a challenge.
If you take my course, I think you will find practicing the techniques on your own to be super helpful. Please do follow my occasional instructions to pause the video and try the exercise I suggest! When you start the video again, I’ll show what I did with the exercise challenge. There are no wrong answers!
The run time for the course is just over an hour. If you do the exercises, you’ll spend up to 90 minutes. The course has quizzes, of course, which do have wrong answers, but I designed the questions to help reinforce your learning. There are no trick questions!
As you work through the course, you’ll learn helpful ways for your team to set and prioritize quality goals. Next, you’ll practice designing small experiments to work towards those goals, step by step. Then, you’ll look at ways to measure progress of those experiments, using DORA’s four key metrics as examples. Finally, I share tips to succeed, and avoid the many perils and pitfalls of using metrics in less-than-ideal ways.
I hope everyone who takes the course will try these simple techniques with their own teams. Continuous quality improvement doesn’t happen by magic. Teams need to work step-by-step through small experiments, using effective metrics to help them stay on track towards their quality goals.
Feedback welcome!
I’d love feedback on the course, so please do get in touch if you take it. Note that you have to fill out a form to get access to the course. The folks at Practitest wants to make sure the content is relevant to where you are in your career. (And of course, they are going to want to send you emails about their other offerings. You can always unsubscribe later! Remember, the courses are free! ) Practitest has contributed so much to our community with their online test conference, webinars, blog posts from leading practitioners, and more. I’m happy to be part of their effort to give different avenues of learning for software professionals.
Do check out the other courses, by leading practitioners in our community.
