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]

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

The Consulting Process

Impact/Effort Matrix

Common Patterns

"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

Anti-Patterns

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 - Metrics for client reporting
• risk-based-testing - Client risk assessment
• 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.