About QA process workflows

Quality assurance (QA) processes are business processes used to maintain a desired level of quality in a service or product. You may use them to outline the necessary procedures and tasks that must be completed to ensure the safety, conformity, and quality of your final product.

Before you start

Before you start modeling QA process workflows, we recommend that you already have a process in mind. Mapping this process out in a diagram application gives you a solid base from which to start.

Things to consider include, but are not limited to:

• Who will be in charge of starting a QA process?
• Who will be responsible for each step?
• What are the criteria needed to complete a QA process?
• What would be some reasons why a QA process could not be completed or need to be restarted?
• What additional actions might need to be taken should a QA process not pass certain criteria?
• Are there any additional actions that should occur at each step? (notifications, status updates, etc).

For example, you may want to create a QA process for your quality assurance team to perform a stress test on a certain product. The steps might be:

1. Lead QA member creates a QA process and selects the appropriate workflow.
2. Lead QA member starts the QA workflow.
3. A sub-task is generated to perform a vibration test and is assigned to another QA member.
4. The sub-task is started.
5. The sub-task is completed successfully and a document is attached outlining the results.
6. The document is attached to the item being tested.
7. The QA workflow completes and is given a status of Passed.

Make sure to include all the steps in your ideal process (happy path) as well as any possible roadblocks (exception path) that may occur. In the preceding example, it might be the case that the designer does not agree with the markup sent to them and assigns it back to the IR creator to change or discard. You should ensure this process is built into your workflow.

To help you in your planning, read through the list of available primitives to get a sense of what is possible.