QA Inflight Stakeholder Meeting

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I want to know that my team is all on the same page about our development progress.

As the name suggests, there are a few key features:

1. QA: The project is just about ready for QA testing. If the group can spot large and/or prominent issues, they can be fixed early and prevent double-testing. This meeting is also a handoff to ensure QA has the appropriate background information and scope of testing to complete their work.
2. Inflight: The project is in a demo-able state, meaning enough progress has been made to see the design come to life. The team should be comfortable triaging any changes suggested in the meeting, and there should still be time and resources available to make significant updates.
3. Stakeholder: The meeting should involve anyone critical in shaping the project and/or has essential background information to share. This can include developers, QA’s, product owners, project managers, customer support, regulatory, etc. You want a diversity of perspectives to help scrutinize all aspects of the implementation. With everyone in the same room or video chat, the team can efficiently discuss resolutions or next steps with the key decision-makers.

Getting started
This meeting is highly adaptable to the needs of your project. Here are a few best practices to get you started:

Setting goals
This meeting works best when there are clear goals for the discussion. Your attendees will have better engagement if they can prepare for specific discussion points.

Live demo
A live demo allows everyone to see the current implementation in action and experience it as a user would. Typically, the lead developer will walk through the main workflows, use cases, and user types. If applicable, the demo is prepared with realistic data to represent best what it will look like once released.

Discussion
The discussion following the live demo should fit the goals of the meeting. However, there a few generally applicable questions which can help move the conversation along:
1. What is the piece that is most likely to break/cause bugs?
2. Do we forget any extensive details, workflows, or use cases?
3. Do our testing records accurately reflect real-world configurations?
4. What follow-ups are needed before we are ready to ship this project?

Try it out
Are you interested in holding a QA Inflight Stakeholder meeting for your next development project?
For small projects, this could be a quick chat between Dev and QA.
For larger projects, you may have a full schedule you want to cover.

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