Introduction

A well known Quick-Serve Restaurant chain was undergoing a transformation within their QA department.

Background

The QA department of this Quick-Serve Restaurant chain managed the deployments and hardware of over 1,200 franchises. This included terminals in the kitchen as well as point-of-sale systems and kiosks.

They tested every release of code as well as marketing updates to kiosks manually. The team was chronically behind and often had to limit their efforts to spot checking instead of any comprehensive testing.

An initiative to introduce automation was underway, but would take over a year of effort to see results. Currently, the automation effort was in an assessment phase.

Approach

After completing the assessment of automation potential, work began to improve conditions overall. After interviews and a large stakeholder meeting, we created alignment as to the problems and potential for QA and had a set of potential improvements and experiments.

Several analysis techniques were employed to break down what contributing factors existed and several insights emerged.

Finally, our efforts focused on one primary concern: Interruptions.

We tracked the number of interruptions and durations during the week. Then we introduced an office hours approach that opened the QA room up for several hours during that week that would be dedicated to interruptions only.

Results

After communicating the office hours, interruptions were virtually eliminated. After tracking the new interruptions over the coming weeks we estimated that every member of QA gained an entire work-day of time back.

This led to the team catching up on their work, performing more thorough testing, leaving work at an appropriate time, and pioneering automation well ahead of the year-long plan.

While these results were tied to our primary focus area we also saw improvements in the QA department's well being. In our analysis, we uncovered they experienced an above average amount of illness. We associated that to the fact that their room was locked and therefore no cleaning staff could clean.

Conclusion

When we presented our findings that we were able to advance our timelines of automation by months while also improving overall quality of releases by the introduction of office hours, people were shocked.

The assumption was that the department was understaffed and under qualified.

It was by applying the unintuitive analysis techniques that we uncovered an underlying issue that gave the department the capacity they needed to do their job better, improve their work-life balance, and develop new skills.