Chapter 5 Getting QA support from others
In this section, we will discuss some top tips that will allow others to QA your work easily. Most of these steps are straightforward, but make a huge difference to a Quality Assurer. It’s important that you are a ‘nice’ person to do QA for!
Arrange a QA resource early. Leaving it until the last minute may result in you struggling to find someone who has time to allocate to the QA, and you might end up with someone who is less than ideal QAing your work.
Make sure syntax and calculation are clear. Explain what you have done and why in each calculation step. This is especially important if the calculations are complex or you have made assumptions that aren’t immediately obvious.
Make sure workbooks are laid out nicely. This can include simple steps such as making sure that calculations flow from left to right, to including separate tabs for assumptions and version control. For more information, and to see some examples, take a look at the DfE Spreadsheet Standards.
If you have pasted numbers into a workbook, explain where they came from. This will be useful both for QAing purposing and when carrying out future updates.
Make expectations on the QA that you need clear to the QAers. Which bits are those that need the most thorough QA? QA checklists can be very helpful. A checklist of mandatory QA activities is available on the DfE Quality Assurance page. This covers only the very basics of QA that you will need to carry out. You will need to carry out different, more specific QA checks depending on the type of work that you have done.
It can be useful to run through the work with a QAer beforehand. Taking half an hour to meet with a QAer and explain the purpose of the work and the expected outcomes can often save a lot of time and give the QAer a head start when it comes to reading your work.
Offer QA assistance to others in return.
Remember, don’t make things needlessly complex! Nobody likes receiving workbooks that are a nightmare to understand, update or QA. Similarly, nobody likes long, complex formulae or syntax that tries to do 3 or 4 things in one step. These take up more time than necessary to QA and increase the likelihood of producing errors.
The length of time a QAer should spend on a piece of work depends on the type of work being done. However, as a general rule of thumb, if it’s taking a QAer longer than two hours to check a piece of work, it is likely that the work is too complex and needs to be simplified by splitting the work into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Taking a little more time to divide processes into clearly explained baby steps makes things easier to QA in the short term and easier to update in the long term. In other words, the more time we spend on QA, the less time we have to spend on the model in future. Plus, taking these steps to ‘declutter’ your notebooks can reduce pressure and stress.
Writing a code in a certain way or using a certain figure may seem to be obvious at the time, but might not when you or someone else looks at it in the future. For example, that decision to use a value of 233.467 in a calculation this morning was very sensible, but in six months time you’ll have completely forgotten why you did that or where that number came from…