User:Gmealer/QA Checklisting Program

What is this?

The QA Checklisting Program is an ongoing effort to document our processes in a way that will make us more effective as a team and more accessible to the Mozilla Community.

The program involves creating checklists and associated brief documentation for repeated processes, especially those that we expect to share with community members or that are of interest outside our team.

Why should we do this?

Reliability

We are the backstop. More than any other engineering team in Mozilla, it's vital that our processes are predictable and reliably repeatable. We must know exactly what we are doing, and we must do it that way every single time.

Transparency

Other teams need to know what we're doing, especially when it directly affects them. We can give them a quick understanding of our processes and set their expectations appropriately. And we can more easily get useful and salient feedback as to whether we're doing the right thing.

Accountability

We take responsibility for the quality of Mozilla's products and properties, and strive to ensure every release is an excellent one. But bad releases will happen. When they do, it is very important that we are able to review exactly what we did so that we can understand what to do better.

Visibility

We do a lot. We should show everyone how much.

Efficiency

The ramp into Mozilla is a tough one. New employees take much longer to become effective when current process documentation is only available anecdotally. Even experienced employees forget processes they don't perform often and are greatly helped by reminders.

Agility

Specialization enables deeper knowledge—at the cost of bottlenecks. If only one person is capable of a task, they must be available before the task can be performed. By moving knowledge into checklists and documentation, anybody can perform any process as needed.

Community

Community energy is a precious resource, and we cannot afford to waste it on scouring wikis for correct information, on time lost to training, and on eager contributors left idle for lack of an available task they know how to perform.

That which makes us efficient and agile makes the community efficient and agile as well. We are the community.