/consultancy-practices

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: 1.0
last_optimized: 2025-12-03
dependencies: []
quick_reference_card: true
tags: [consulting, advisory, client-engagement, quality-assessment, transformation]
trust_tier: 1
validation:
  schema_path: schemas/output.json

Consultancy Practices

<default_to_action> When consulting on quality: 1. LISTEN FIRST: Understand their context before prescribing solutions 2. DISCOVER: What's the pain? What have they tried? What are constraints? 3. PRIORITIZE: Impact/effort matrix - high impact, low effort first 4. TRANSFER KNOWLEDGE: Leave them better, not dependent on you 5. 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?"

</default_to_action>

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:** 1. Unit tests for new code (TDD) 2. Smoke tests for critical paths 3. Keep exploratory for discovery 4. 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:** 1. Shift testing left 2. Improve coverage on critical paths 3. Speed up CI/CD feedback 4. 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"

**Discovery:** Current QA:Dev ratio? Where's QA spending time?

**Typical Finding:** QA is bottleneck - manual regression, gatekeeping

**Recommendation:** 1. Make QA strategic, not tactical 2. Developers own test automation 3. QA focuses on exploratory, risk analysis 4. Use agentic approaches for scale

---

Difficult Situations

**"We already tried that"** → "Tell me what you tried and what didn't work" (learn from their experience)

**"Our context is special"** → "Help me understand what makes yours special" (they might be right, or making excuses)

**"We don't have budget/time"** → "What's the cost of not fixing this? Let's start small" (show ROI)

**"That won't work here"** → "What specific constraints? Let's adapt" (find what WILL work)

---

Agent Integration

// Automated codebase assessment
const assessment = await Task("Assess Codebase", {
  scope: 'client-project/',
  depth: 'comprehensive',
  reportFormat: 'executive-summary'
}, "qe-quality-analyzer");

// Returns: { qualityScore, testCoverage, technicalDebt, recommendations }

// ROI analysis for quality initiatives
const roi = await Task("Calculate ROI", {
  currentState: { defectEscapeRate: 0.15, mttr: 48 },
  proposedImprovements: ['test-automation', 'ci-cd-pipeline'],
  timeframe: '6-months'
}, "qe-quality-analyzer");

// Returns: { estimatedCost, estimatedSavings, paybackPeriod }

---

Agent Coordination Hints

Memory Namespace

aqe/consultancy/
├── assessments/*      - Client assessments
├── recommendations/*  - Prioritized recommendations
├── roi-analysis/*     - ROI calculations
└── progress/*         - Implementation tracking

Fleet Coordination

const consultingFleet = await FleetManager.coordinate({
  strategy: 'client-engagement',
  agents: [
    'qe-quality-analyzer',          // Assess current state
    'qe-regression-risk-analyzer',  // Risk assessment
    'qe-quality-gate',              // Define quality gates
    'qe-deployment-readiness'       // Deployment maturity
  ],
  topology: 'hierarchical'
});

---

Related Skills

• [quality-metrics](../quality-metrics/) - Metrics for client reporting
• [risk-based-testing](../risk-based-testing/) - Client risk assessment
• [holistic-testing-pact](../holistic-testing-pact/) - Comprehensive strategy

---

Remember

**Good consulting is about empowering teams, not creating dependency.** Your success is measured by them not needing you anymore - while still wanting to work with you again.

**Best compliment:** "We've got this now, but when we tackle X next year, we're calling you."

Be honest. Be helpful. Be context-driven. Leave them better.