Questar Assessment Reviews

Company hasn't made the mindset shift that they are now in the SaaS business first - test development and scoring second. This isn't to say that test development and scoring aren't highly critical to the Questar business model, but the migration to on-line testing has been treated almost as an after thought. Often with the mentality of, well, the test is ready for print, it just needs to get on-line. The technology team (Developers, QA, IT Project Management) is often working until 3 or 4 in the morning since there was no planning done on how we think things should go and modify as we find something that doesn't work well. All too often folks are just learning what is actually needed and asking other new folks how the work gets to done; which no one really knows since almost half of the company is new. CEO has ideas of how things are and seems genuinely shocked when she hears that's not reality. It's unclear if she's that unaware or getting bad information from directors that don't want to appear they too aren't clear on what's going on. Company portrays they are Agile and building a product. There is Agile in the sense there are stand ups daily, but there is no adherence to the other Agile principles. Product development is purely reactionary to requirements that are often communicated last minute. Very little respect for work/life balance. If you have a conflict in the evening or weekend, feels like you are looked down upon for not doing as much as others.

Inability to "talk people down" from needless worry, inability to grasp priorities with edge case over major feature release. These become mis-labeled as "inability to plan", which is not true; Questar has some excellent planners, but the plan is circumvented by panic. That panic means that over in dev-land, you get pulled off of the work that has been carefully planned, to engage in evening and weekend heroics over and over and over. The turnover has been severe, so there are fewer and ever fewer people in dev who have deep product knowledge. This creates issues which in turn fuels the cycle of panic that defines the company. Any management ideology that strives for sanity and restraint is eventually dismantled because it is obstructionist to the panic. Edge case defects, so inevitable in web-based solutions, are killing us because we do not have the capacity to leave off our planned work to address these, but we do to a fault. You might say it's a tail wagging the dog scenario.