A well-structured quality maturity assessment offers much more than a snapshot in time. It provides clear, prioritized recommendations tailored to the team’s context. But even with a strong starting point, what ultimately matters is how the team acts on those results once the assessment is complete.
In this post, we share four key recommendations to help teams get the most value from the results of a quality maturity assessment and software testing efforts.
Start with a Shared Understanding of the Quality Maturity Assessment Results
For many teams, it’s tempting to skim the results of a quality maturity assessment and move straight into fixing mode. However, sustainable improvement starts with something more thoughtful and foundational: building a shared understanding.
Rather than treating the report as a simple task list or a summary for management, taking time to reflect on the findings as a team lays the groundwork for implementing changes with greater clarity and purpose. This process usually requires more than one conversation. People need time to process what they’ve read, ask questions, and connect the results to their day-to-day experience.
It’s valuable to encourage conversations across different roles, including testers, developers, product leaders, product owners, UX designers, and managers. Questions like What stood out to us the most? Which observations felt accurate? Which ones didn’t? What questions did this raise? What sparked our curiosity? can be effective prompts to open dialogue.
These conversations help build alignment, not just around what the report says, but also around what it means in the team’s context. Agreement on next steps can come later. This stage is about building a shared understanding and a common frame of reference from which everyone can move forward.
Review Prioritized Recommendations Strategically
Once the team has a shared understanding of the results, it’s time to shift the conversation from what the findings mean to what to do with them. This is where the structure of the quality maturity assessment becomes especially useful.
A well-structured assessment already includes recommendations organized by area and prioritized as a starting point. That doesn’t mean, however, that every high-priority item needs to be addressed right away. Taking a strategic approach means stepping back to see the bigger picture and making decisions based not just on urgency, but also on potential impact in the short, medium, and long term.
The goal isn’t to create a perfect plan, but to begin organizing improvements in an intentional and sustainable way, so the team isn’t overwhelmed or burned out before meaningful change begins.
Decide How to Develop the Necessary Skills
As teams begin to define which actions to take, it’s worth asking a practical question: do we have the skills and capacity to support these changes?
Many recommendations, especially those that help teams progress in quality maturity, depend on a mix of technical and interpersonal skills. Those skills aren’t always available in-house. That’s not a weakness, but something to recognize in order to make realistic, well-informed decisions.
Collaborative and leadership skills are essential for improvement efforts to succeed. They shape how people work together, communicate, and drive change across roles. These aren’t secondary or nice-to-have skills. They’re foundational, supporting every other change a team aims to implement.
For each recommendation a team plans to prioritize, it’s important to consider whether the necessary capabilities and skills already exist, or whether they need to be developed, hired, or brought in temporarily. In some cases, investing in internal skill development through mentoring, pair work, or structured learning makes sense. In others, it may be more effective to bring in someone with specific experience or collaborate with external experts for a limited time.
There’s no single right answer. The best path forward depends on the team’s context, including budget, timelines, organizational priorities, and constraints.
Being honest about a team’s strengths, gaps, and working context doesn’t slow progress. On the contrary, it creates the conditions for meaningful and sustainable improvement.
Create a Roadmap for Action
Once the team has clarity around its priorities and needs, the next step is to build an action plan. This doesn’t need to be highly detailed, but rather a shared guide that helps the team take action and stay aligned, serving as a compass for what comes next.
Teams can build on the ceremonies they already have in place, such as retrospectives, sprint planning, or PI planning, to revisit priorities and review progress. These recurring moments help keep the roadmap visible without adding extra overhead. Targeted sessions or workshops can also be introduced when needed, either at the start or at specific moments, to help the team focus on particular changes.
It’s important to periodically review whether these activities are still relevant and to retire them once the related practices or skills have been incorporated, rather than keeping them out of inertia. They should remain in place only as long as they continue to add value and support the team’s progress.
For each prioritized recommendation, it’s important to define owners, timelines, and review points. This helps clarify who is leading each initiative and when the team will pause to reflect or adjust course.
Many teams find it useful to link each change to a broader goal and to define concrete criteria for reviewing progress. Whether the focus is on improving testing effectiveness, strengthening collaboration, or achieving more predictable delivery, the work should remain aligned with the team’s overall direction.
When building the plan, consider how recommendations will unfold across the short, medium, and long term. The roadmap should be realistic and support a balanced flow of work that fits the team’s context, leaving room to develop new skills, bring in additional team members, or collaborate with external experts when needed. It should reflect the team’s actual capacity, not just the ambition behind the recommendations.
A strong roadmap turns strategy into action and gives the team the space it needs to learn and adapt over time. Setting aside regular moments to review and adjust it, as improvements become part of the team’s culture, is an essential part of continuous improvement.
A long-term perspective
The results of a quality maturity assessment are not an end point, but a starting point. They help guide not just what to improve, but also how a team can evolve over time.
Revisit the assessment periodically to understand what has shifted, what still needs work, and what new challenges have emerged. The value of the assessment grows when it becomes part of an ongoing learning cycle, not a one-time event.
Frequently Asked Questions After a Quality Maturity Assessment
What should teams do after a quality maturity assessment?
How should recommendations from a quality maturity assessment be prioritized?
How can recommendations from a quality maturity assessment be turned into concrete actions?
Why is it important to align the team before implementing improvements?
What skills do teams typically need to advance in quality maturity?
What role do leaders and managers play after a quality maturity assessment?
Ready to Turn Insight Into Action?
Contact us to learn how QAdrive’s Quality Maturity Assessment can help your team grow with focus, clarity, and the right support.
