Page - 169 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

Embracing Qualitywith Design Thinking 169 mindset among team members. The mindset animates their process and is useful to consider for adoption generally. Some of the mindset attributes are “human centered,” “bias toward action,” “radical collaboration,” “show don’t tell,” and “mindfulofprocess.” The last approachwewill explore isDesigningforGrowthdevelopedbyJeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie [4]. This approach is designed to ask and answer four questions in dedicated stages. These questions are in order “What is?,” “What if?,” “What wows?,” and “What works?.”Their approachand their motivations for developing this process are closely aligned with the business need to generate new business value. Like the other two general processes, the starting point is the first stage listed and the successful stopping point occurs when “What works?” is truly completed. Iterationswithinandbetween thesestagesare likely necessary. Inorder to make these stages actionable, a set of ten tools have been described [4]. These in turn have been expanded upon by techniques that have been documented in a workbook [12]. Unlike the Double Diamond process, the result of this process is not a market-ready product or service. Liedtka and Ogilvie are committed to the need for learning up until the very end. The “What works?” ends with a limited and controlled market test that emulates practical conditions that may uncover significant challenges. A highly functional preproduction prototype is developed that enables the team to uncover flaws that need to be corrected prior to fully committing to amarketorproduction-readyoffering. 4 Design Thinking’sRole inQuality By using design thinking to focus on users and their experiences, the team has a means to gauge the design’s potential along the embracing quality continuum. Iterating multiple design approaches through the make-learn-evaluate cycle with users provides the design team multiple opportunities to identify disagreeable aspects of designs, understand users’ interests, calibrate outcome expectations, and prioritize promising elements of a design. By remaining agile and open to change, design thinking teams avoid prematurely committing to assumptions, understandings,andpreferences that donotalignwithactualuse, expectations,and users. Design thinking directs development efforts to produce tangible design alter- natives for user evaluations. Having a concrete representation of design ideas allows users to experience ideas; provides a common visible point of reference from which to offer and interpret feedback; and acts as a baseline from which to suggest revisions or alternatives. Figure 5 depicts active design thinking efforts as a central motivating force for development activities. Various quality objectives must remainunaddressedor limited in order to maintain speed and responsiveness. Manyunderlying infrastructurecomponentsup to the pointofa premarket test will unlikely experience load and diverse usage patterns that deviate from guided user evaluationsession objectives.The limited rangeof usage allows forvariousquality