Skip to content

Quality Roles & Responsibilities

Defined Quality Roles and Responsibilities

Summary

Quality and testing activities have documented role assignments that establish responsibility and accountability across the delivery lifecycle.

Standards

  1. Delivery teams and vendors working on the same product or service MUST maintain a shared, documented responsibility model covering every quality and testing activity within their delivery scope across planning, design, implementation, verification, release, and operation. std-qe-defined-quality-responsibilities-01
  2. For each quality and testing activity, the responsibility model MUST identify the role accountable for its outcome and each role responsible for performing it. std-qe-defined-quality-responsibilities-02
  3. Delivery teams and vendors MUST update the responsibility model when a change to scope, delivery parties, or role assignments makes it inaccurate. std-qe-defined-quality-responsibilities-03

Implements These Principles

Assigned Activities and Shared Quality Ownership

Summary

Quality responsibilities are allocated across the roles whose decisions and work affect product or service quality.

Standards

  1. The responsibility model MUST assign quality responsibilities to each product, business, engineering, delivery, operations, support, supplier, and QA role whose decisions or work affect product or service quality. std-qe-shared-quality-ownership-01
  2. A role accountable for work MUST retain accountability for the quality outcomes within that work when another role supports, reviews, tests, or assures it. std-qe-shared-quality-ownership-02
  3. QA MUST NOT be assigned sole accountability for product or service quality or for a quality outcome controlled by another role. std-qe-shared-quality-ownership-03

Implements These Principles

QA Oversight Across Quality Activities

Summary

The QA function has visibility of and evaluates quality and testing activities regardless of which role performs them.

Standards

  1. The QA function MUST have access to the responsibility model and the scope, status, evidence, findings, gaps, and accepted risks for every quality and testing activity. std-qe-qa-oversight-01
  2. The QA function MUST review planned and completed quality and testing activities to identify omissions, overlaps, inconsistent approaches, and evidence that is insufficient to support the stated outcome or decision. std-qe-qa-oversight-02
  3. The QA function MUST record and communicate each material concern identified through its oversight to the responsible and accountable roles and to any decision-maker relying on the affected evidence. std-qe-qa-oversight-03
  4. QA oversight MUST NOT transfer responsibility for performing an activity or accountability for its outcome or related decisions unless the role assignments are explicitly changed in the responsibility model. std-qe-qa-oversight-04

Implements These Principles