Process & strategy in QE: Why uneven Quality undermines delivery
Process & Strategy are among the most overlooked drivers of uneven software quality, and one of the biggest reasons delivery slows down in modern organisations. Uneven quality rarely shows up as a single major failure. Instead, it appears as persistent friction: delivery timelines that slip, releases that trigger unexpected incidents, and teams spending too much time fixing issues that should have been prevented earlier in the lifecycle.
Importantly, in our experience, organisations experiencing uneven quality do not lack processes or effort. The issue is a lack of alignment. When there is no clear, shared quality strategy, teams are left to interpret what “quality” means for themselves. Each interpretation may make sense in isolation – speed for one team, coverage for another, documentation for a third – but collectively they create uneven risk coverage, inconsistent outcomes, and declining delivery confidence.
These challenges often exist alongside tight delivery capacity, complex stakeholder environments, and growing expectations around operational resilience and customer experience. Regardless of whether organisations operate in financial services, utilities, higher education, healthcare, or large-scale enterprise environments, the outcome is the same: reduced predictability and increased cost of change.
This problem is also frequently misunderstood. Leaders often attribute quality issues to a lack of testing, insufficient automation, or tooling gaps. In reality, uneven quality is most often a process and strategy problem. Without a shared strategy, quality does not fail loudly, it erodes quietly through duplicated effort, missed risks, and growing uncertainty late in delivery.
This is why Process & Strategy is the first domain in our nine-domain QE maturity assessment. Before organisations can uplift automation, modernise tooling, or embed quality engineering practices at scale, they must first align on how quality is defined, governed, and operationalised.
What “Process & Strategy” means in a Quality Engineering Context
Process and strategy in quality engineering is not about creating more documentation or introducing rigid compliance gates. It is about establishing a clear operating model that ensures every team invests quality effort where it matters most and follows practices that support delivery speed, stability, and repeatability.
A mature quality strategy sets expectations for how quality is achieved across the lifecycle, including how teams handle risk, validate changes, and maintain confidence as delivery cadence increases. It enables consistency across squads and programs, while still allowing flexibility for different products, platforms, and customer needs.
When strategy is absent or unclear, teams naturally fill the gap themselves. Over time, this leads to:
- Outdated or overly rigid processes that no longer align with Agile or DevOps ways of working
- Entry and exit criteria that vary between teams
- Documentation that becomes performative rather than purposeful
- Blurred roles and responsibilities across product, engineering, quality, and operations
The result is not control, it is confusion.
When the strategy is clear, teams have shared answers to critical questions such as:
- What does quality mean for this organisation and this product?
- What level of assurance is expected before release, and why?
- Where are the highest risks, and how will we cover them?
- How do we prevent defects and incidents, rather than reacting to them?
- How do we measure whether we are improving?
Without this clarity, quality becomes subjective. Each team fills the gaps with their own assumptions. Over time, quality maturity diverges across delivery teams, and leadership sees “uneven quality” as a symptom, without visibility of the structural cause.
The business cost of uneven quality
The impact of uneven quality is often underestimated because it is spread across multiple cost centres: engineering effort, operational disruption, customer impact, risk exposure, and leadership attention.
Globally, the cost of poor software quality is significant. The Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) estimated that the cost of poor software quality in the United States grew to at least $2.41 trillion in 2022, with major contributors including operational failures and technical debt. While that number is US-based, the drivers behind it are universal: complexity, speed of change, and growing dependencies across systems.
At an organisational level, uneven quality tends to trigger the same pattern:
- Issues emerge later than they should.
- Fixes become urgent and disruptive.
- Teams lose confidence and slow down releases.
- Senior stakeholders become more cautious, leading to more overhead and approvals.
- Delivery predictability declines even as investment increases.
Without strategic alignment, testing becomes reactive rather than preventative. Quality effort is spent responding to issues instead of reducing risk upfront. Lead times increase, handovers multiply, and confidence drops late in delivery, exactly when organisations can least afford it.
The result is poor ROI on delivery spend. Budgets increase, but outcomes do not improve at the same rate. That is a costly place to be, particularly in Australia, where technology organisations are expected to modernise rapidly, manage risk responsibly, and do more with constrained skills availability.
Australia’s digital capability challenges and skills shortages have been consistently highlighted across industry and government sources, reinforcing how important repeatable delivery models are when experienced capacity is limited.
Why strategy breaks down in real delivery environments
Most organisations do not set out to create poor or inconsistent quality. These issues typically emerge through delivery evolution: changing delivery models, shifting team structures, new tools, new platforms, and rapid scaling without quality strategy evolving at the same pace.
Some of the most common strategy breakdowns include:
Outdated quality processes that no longer align to Agile and DevOps delivery. Teams may be operating in modern delivery cadences, but still rely on practices designed for phase-based testing. This typically forces quality activity to occur late, increasing risk and rework.
Over-prescriptive requirements that slow teams without improving confidence. Heavy documentation can create the impression of rigour, but often fails to improve quality outcomes if it is not tied to risk and measurable assurance.
Inconsistent entry and exit expectations across teams. If one team releases with minimal controls and another requires extensive sign-off, leadership cannot predict delivery performance. Uneven quality becomes embedded by design, not by accident.
Unclear ownership across roles and responsibilities. When quality expectations are not explicitly defined, teams end up with gaps between product, engineering, quality, and operations. Issues are then discovered through escalation rather than prevention.
A lack of risk-based prioritisation. When everything is tested equally, critical scenarios do not receive the depth of assurance they require. This is where organisations face the most significant operational risk.
What mature Process & Strategy looks like
High maturity in process and strategy is best described as “clarity with flexibility”. It creates consistent expectations without limiting delivery speed.
A mature quality strategy includes a shared definition of quality outcomes aligned to business priorities such as customer experience, service continuity, and safe change. It treats quality strategy as a living capability, not a static artefact – evolving as delivery models, technologies, and risk profiles change.
It ensures repeatability across squads through standards that are practical and measurable, and it enables governance without relying on heavy, centralised approval gates.
Importantly, mature organisations measure quality in ways that reflect delivery performance and operational stability, not just test execution volumes or defect counts.
This is where DORA metrics are valuable. DORA defines four key metrics for measuring software delivery performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service. These metrics matter because they connect quality strategy directly to outcomes leaders care about: speed, reliability, and business impact.
The ROI Link: how process & strategy deliver value fast
Process and strategy improvements often deliver ROI faster than organisations expect because they remove waste that consumes delivery capacity without delivering customer value. That waste includes repeated rework, release delays, high incident volumes after deployments, and unplanned effort spent triaging defects.
This is also why quality engineering is increasingly being positioned as “business assurance”, not simply testing. The World Quality Report 2023–24 highlights the growing focus on scaling quality engineering practices in modern delivery, particularly as AI accelerates development speed.
When strategy is aligned, quality scales. When it isn’t, unevenness quietly undermines predictability – even as teams work harder and deliver faster.
Where this fits in your quality maturity journey
If your organisation is experiencing uneven quality, the most effective next step is not to add more process for the sake of control. It is to identify where strategy is unclear, inconsistent, or outdated, and then uplift maturity in a way that supports modern delivery.
Process and strategy are only one of nine domains that influence quality outcomes, but it is the one that creates the foundation for everything else: governance, automation, environments, risk coverage, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
To make this practical, we recommend starting with a structured maturity view across all nine domains, so improvement efforts are targeted and prioritised based on impact.
