| name | consultancy-practices |
| description | Apply effective software quality consultancy practices. Use when consulting, advising clients, or establishing consultancy workflows. |
| category | professional-practice |
| priority | medium |
| tokenEstimate | 950 |
| agents | ["qe-quality-analyzer","qe-regression-risk-analyzer","qe-quality-gate"] |
| implementation_status | optimized |
| optimization_version | 1 |
| last_optimized | "2025-12-03T00:00:00.000Z" |
| dependencies | [] |
| quick_reference_card | true |
| tags | ["consulting","advisory","client-engagement","quality-assessment","transformation"] |
| trust_tier | 1 |
| validation | {"schema_path":"schemas/output.json"} |
Consultancy Practices
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When consulting on quality:
- LISTEN FIRST: Understand their context before prescribing solutions
- DISCOVER: What's the pain? What have they tried? What are constraints?
- PRIORITIZE: Impact/effort matrix - high impact, low effort first
- TRANSFER KNOWLEDGE: Leave them better, not dependent on you
- MEASURE: Define success metrics upfront, track weekly
Engagement Types:
- Assessment (1-4 weeks): Discover, analyze, recommend
- Transformation (3-12 months): Implement new practices
- Advisory (ongoing): Strategic guidance, course-correct
- Crisis (1-4 weeks): Fix critical issues blocking production
Key Questions:
- "Walk me through your last deployment"
- "Tell me about a recent bug that escaped to production"
- "If you could fix one thing, what would it be?"
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Quick Reference Card
Common Patterns (What Clients Say vs. What They Mean)
"We Need Test Automation"
What they say: "We need test automation"
What they mean: "Manual testing is too slow/expensive"
Discovery: How long is regression? What's deployment frequency?
Typical Finding: They need faster feedback, not "automation"
Recommendation:
- Unit tests for new code (TDD)
- Smoke tests for critical paths
- Keep exploratory for discovery
- Build automation incrementally
"Fix Our Quality Problem"
What they say: "We have too many bugs"
What they mean: "Something is broken but we don't know what"
Discovery: Where found? What types? When introduced?
Typical Finding: No test strategy, testing too late, poor feedback loops
Recommendation:
- Shift testing left
- Improve coverage on critical paths
- Speed up CI/CD feedback
- Better requirements/acceptance criteria
"We Want to Scale Quality"
What they say: "Growing fast, quality can't keep up"
What they mean: "Can't hire enough QA fast enough"
Current QA:Dev ratio? Where's QA spending time?
