How do you get business people to take QA test seriously? | Hacker News Reader

How do you get business people to take QA test seriously?

6 pointspcurve2 comments

Is it common for business people to 'sign-off' on what they see in QA environment, but then repeatedly comeback with more changes afterward? It's one thing if the change is a major bug or show-stopper, but 3/4th of the changes appear to be 'minor' changes and typos, for which there were plenty of chances to correct. Unfortunately, nothing really is minor.

And many of these changes magically appear near the release date, which tells me that business folks don't take testing seriously until the last moment.

I understand business people are not professional QA testers, and they may be distracted by their day-to-day tasks. But how do you get them to take testing seriously?

If you had similar experience at your organization, how did you overcome the problem?

I hear a lot of talk about agile these days but it all looks like waterfall to me. The development and QA teams need to do whatever it takes to support the business, including dealing with the fact that go-live has magical powers to generate change requests. QA is part of the team, so do what you can to support change right up to the last minute.

As a person who majored in Computer Information Systems but is considered a "business person" (ecommerce manager) I can confidently say that this problem does exist in the workplace by most "business people". It doesn't only happen at small/mid size companies. This problem exists even at the enterprise level. We are very highly ranked in the IR500. (top 100)

The way to overcome this problem is make very clear to executive "business people" how risky/costly (change management, bugs, etc.) a relatively small problem could create.

For example in ecommerce if you make a "minor" change to the checkout process which results in the site not accepting orders, or even a small percentage of orders the damages would be substantial at a financial, and customer level.

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