Everyone owns quality—but not everything
Shared quality ownership is healthy only when specific responsibilities remain explicit.
AskAQA principle: Shared ownership should increase collaboration, not erase accountability.
Define accountability by activity
| Activity | Typical accountable role |
|---|---|
| Business requirements | Product / Business |
| Code quality | Engineering |
| Quality strategy | QA / Quality leadership |
| Deployment pipeline | DevOps / Platform |
| Business acceptance | Business / Product |
| Production reliability | Operations / SRE |
Use RACI selectively
A RACI can clarify who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for critical quality activities. Keep it focused on decisions and handoffs that are actually ambiguous.
Watch for accountability gaps
- No owner for test data
- No owner for regression maintenance
- No one approves production monitoring
- Vendor owns testing but no internal reviewer
- QA expected to sign off without decision authority
Escalation is part of accountability
When quality risk is outside QA ownership, QA should still surface it to the accountable role and preserve the evidence of the decision.