Quality Roles & Responsibilities
Defined Quality Roles and Responsibilities
Summary
Every quality and testing activity has clearly defined ownership and participation across the product or service lifecycle.
Reasoning
Unclear responsibilities create gaps, duplicated effort, delayed decisions, and assumptions that another role has addressed an activity. Defining responsibilities across planning, design, implementation, verification, release, and operation makes the complete scope of quality work visible and identifies activities without an owner.
A shared responsibility model, such as RASCI, records who is responsible and accountable for each activity and who supports, is consulted, or is informed. This gives the team a common understanding of participation, decision authority, and expected contributions.
Implemented By These Standards
Assigned Activities and Shared Quality Ownership
Summary
Quality remains a shared responsibility even when specific testing and assurance activities are assigned to named roles.
Reasoning
Assigning an activity establishes who leads or performs it, but does not transfer responsibility for quality to that role alone. Product, business, engineering, delivery, operations, support, suppliers, and QA each remain responsible for the quality consequences of their decisions and work.
Shared ownership allows specialist roles to contribute their expertise without becoming the sole source of quality.
Implemented By These Standards
QA Oversight Across Quality Activities
Summary
The QA function retains oversight of quality and testing activities regardless of which role performs them.
Reasoning
Quality activities are distributed among the roles with the relevant skills, context, and authority. Without oversight across those activities, evidence, risks, dependencies, and gaps can remain fragmented even when each assigned activity is completed.
QA maintains a view of planned and completed assurance, challenges whether the approach and evidence are sufficient, and makes unresolved concerns visible. This oversight applies even where no QA practitioner performs the activity, while execution and decision accountability remain with the roles to which they are assigned.