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By Emna Ayadi (Sogeti France) and Eveline Moolenaars (Sogeti Nederland)
In DevOps teams, quality is a shared responsibility. Yet, as quality engineering and testing is a whole-team activity, the test expertise and quality advocacy that testers often bring along, run the risk of fading into the background. Even when teams have dedicated testers, they often struggle to keep up with delivery demands. This is where quality coaching steps in, supporting teams to take control of their product quality and the testing activities in a collaborative, not directive, way.
Quality coaching means challenging and supporting teams tobuild a collaborative approach to quality through one or moreactivities depending on the context:
Anyone can coach quality in their team or organization: testers, Scrum Masters, engineers, managers. For simplicity, we’ll refer to the “quality coach” throughout this document based on The Quality Coach’s Handbook [Charret 2025].
The Quality Coaching Interaction (QCI) framework helps structure your quality coaching in three steps as shown in the following figure.
Quality coaching always starts with a challenge or problem regarding quality. No challenge, no change. Dig deep: what’s really going on? Use stakeholder interviews, the 5 Whys, or other root cause analysis techniques.
Bring people together to explore the problem and co-create solutions. Use creative formats like games, workshops, anything that breaks routine and sparks insight.
Don’t let insights fade. Help participants reflect on what they learned about quality and each other. Use open questions and tailor your approach to different personalities (visual, auditory,introvert, etc.). This step enables the team or organization to actually tackle the initial challenge and put the new insights into action.
The Quality Coaching Interaction Framework is one of the key tools available to a quality coach. Many other tools can also be used, depending on the necessary activities, such as coaching, facilitating, or training.
What stands out in all these tools is the importance of creativity:suspending judgement, generating diverse ideas before narrowing them down, being aware of your own constraints and learning how to adapt or overcome them. In addition to creativity, quality engineering and testing are essential. When combining general tools, creativity and quality engineering, these elements form the ultimate toolbox for effective quality coaching. Now, that toolbox is extended with Generative AI (GenAI).
GenAI can support in preparing and executing each step of the QCI framework:
Keep in mind that GenAI needs guidance. Think of it as a brilliant intern, smart but inexperienced. You must micromanage it: explain your context and goals clearly and precisely.
To help, we built the Prompting Machine, a simple tool based on the Crafting AI prompts Framework [Egelmeers 2023]. You can use it either as a basic Excel template or as a building block for a GenAI agent. The tool constructs prompts from structured parameters using dropdown lists. To make sure GenAI interprets these prompts as you want, we created a dictionary that explains the variables defined within our quality coaching and quality engineering context.This Dictionary and Prompting Machine can be extended: you can add new definitions to better fit your own context. You can download the template here.
How it works:
Quality coaching is not just about following steps; it’s about people learning and growing together. We try, we fail, we improve. Now, GenAI is here to help us go faster, think broader, and test smarter. It’s like having a teammate who never sleeps. But remember: AI can support, not replace. You are the driver. You decide the direction.So, give your GenAI assistant a real chance, but don’t lose your human touch. That’s where real quality lives.
Overview
