The QA architecture handbook: Guide for building a quality-first culture

This short guide provides a structured framework and practical advice for building a rock-solid, end-to-end QA architecture in an organization.

This handbook is designed to assist you, whether you are beginning to develop your QA processes, or you're seeking to enhance your current practices, by outlining the key steps and important factors to consider.

Note: This is not a QA personal growth roadmap type handbook. For that, please refer to the rather widely used QA roadmap for topics that can be improved in terms of personal QA growth.

Core philosophy

Before exploring the details, it is essential to recognize a key principle: Quality is not exclusively the duty of the QA team; rather, it is a collective responsibility that encompasses all teams and individuals engaged in the software development process.

This handbook aims to assist you in cultivating a quality-first culture, empowering everyone to play a role in delivering outstanding products.

Four pillars of a QA architecture

We will explore the creation of a solid QA architecture through four interconnected pillars:

• Culture Foundation: Establishing a quality culture; fostering a quality-first mindset and developing essential planning processes to support it.
• Core Infrastructure: Implementing continuous deployments, continuous monitoring, and early issue detection; building a robust infrastructure for ongoing monitoring, proactive issue identification, and ensuring security.
• Automations: Scaling confidence by deploying comprehensive automated processes and tests to guarantee process and code quality, functionality, and performance.
• Exploratory and Manual Testing: Leveraging human insight, creativity, and user feedback to identify issues and enhance the overall user experience.

Sections & Resources

• Go to Section 1: Culture Foundation - cultivating a quality culture
• Go to Section 2: Core Infrastructure - monitoring and early detection
• Go to Section 3: Automations - building confidence at scale
• Go to Section 4: Exploratory and Manual Testing - the human touch

Contribution and style guidelines

Your contributions to this handbook are highly appreciated. To ensure consistency and readability, we created a set of guidelines. Please refer to the Contribution and style guidelines for more details.

License

This handbook is licensed under the MIT License. Feel free to use, share, and modify it according to your needs.