A Maturity Bug: Confusing an Executed Process with a Consolidated One

It has been very common, in the Quality Assurance diagnostics I conduct on software development projects, to encounter a menu of executed but not consolidated processes. And this difference between what is already corporate routine versus what is mere experimentation (or what depends on a certain voluntarism, or even what depends on prerequisites that were never implemented) — this difference translates into a masked maturity gap. This hidden gap must come to light as soon as possible, under penalty of absorbing, much like a black hole, even the processes that were already consolidated (on paper, it looks like evolution; in practice, it is fragility).

I am talking, for example, about root-cause analyses conducted without a proper defect management process; about automation frameworks built without risk analysis — or without governance and maintenance —; or, still, about complex exploratory testing performed based on undocumented domain knowledge (the classic case that, taken to its extreme, can be illustrated by the chaos that takes over a project when a QA with deep project/business knowledge leaves the team without having documented their practices).

In all these cases, the problem is not a lack of technique — it is a lack of model: ISTQB covers model-based testing in its Test Management syllabi; I want to propose here the extension of that concept to a model-based Quality Assurance framework, in which all processes and tools are built upon a maturity model.

In fact, I have been implementing this approach for some time, working with maturity models that distinguish the executed from the consolidated and that can even indicate that an “advanced” process may be more harmful than its absence. In practice, a non-consolidated process with high visibility (for example, the use of a cutting-edge tool or technology) but low effectiveness (due to a lack of governance or of prerequisite layers) can compromise already-consolidated processes by “diverting” resources and energy on account of its visibility.

There is a reason maturity is a staircase. One must first consolidate the basics before advancing to more complex actions; executing without a foundation, or driven by excitement alone, increases the Cost of Quality. And that means missed deadlines, regulatory and legal exposure, and, of course, reputational damag