Bridging the gap between business and QE: Speaking the language of risk and compliance

More and more, QEs are expected to be key contributors to organisational assurance and resilience.

It’s a repositioning that will often require the use of some practical strategies.

So let’s take a look at how your firm can integrate QE activities into things like governance, risk and compliance (GRC) processes, improving audit visibility and reframing quality outputs – all in ways that will resonate with your stakeholders.

1. Understanding the risk and compliance landscape

The strict financial regulatory frameworks we all have to work under result in risk and compliance teams focusing on maintaining operational resilience, data integrity, auditable systems and adherence to legal requirements. Your firm’s risk and compliance team’s main focus will be to ensure your firm stays secure, trustworthy and legally compliant.

Your quality engineers, on the other hand, will often concentrate on system performance, functionality and automation coverage. Although these activities touch on business risk, they’re rarely communicated in the same language or format. This disconnect can lead to opportunities to demonstrate value being missed.

For example, if a performance issue delays financial trade settlement, it’s not just a bug – it’s a potential breach of regulatory obligations. Likewise, if customer data isn't masked appropriately during testing, it poses a significant GDPR compliance risk.

Your firm’s quality engineers must learn to interpret and communicate their findings in terms of risk impact. Understanding key frameworks such as ISO 31000 (risk management) can help your quality professionals to align their work with broader enterprise goals. By shifting the focus from ‘test coverage’ to ‘control effectiveness’ and ‘risk mitigation’, your quality engineers can position themselves as partners in compliance and assurance.

2. Embedding QE into governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes

Modern GRC platforms – such as Archer, ServiceNow GRC and MetricStream – are increasingly connected to DevOps pipelines. Yet QE teams often remain peripheral to these systems.

Embedding QE into your firm’s GRC processes means going beyond functional testing and contributing directly to compliance monitoring and internal control validation. You’ll need to:

• Support risk assessments for new system implementations.
• Validate control effectiveness via automated tests.
• Supply reliable, auditable evidence for regulators and internal auditors.

Here’s a practical example: a QE team working with a financial services provider develops automated tests that validate whether data masking and encryption protocols are in place across customer-facing applications.

Those tests won't just ensure quality: they’ll help demonstrate GDPR compliance.

In agile environments, compliance and control requirements can be integrated into acceptance criteria. Quality engineers can then design test scenarios that explicitly validate those requirements. Doing so will ensure compliance gets ‘baked in’ during development rather than bolted on at the end.

Your firm’s QE professionals might also support the creation of traceability matrices, linking user stories to control objectives, test cases and audit artefacts. That kind of dual-purpose output will serve not only your delivery teams but also your audit functions, reinforcing your QE professionals’ role in compliance.

3. Creating a shared language of risk

Risk and compliance professionals rarely engage with testing metrics. They care about risk exposure, business continuity and reputational impact. For your QE professionals to add strategic value, they must translate technical findings into business-aligned insights.

For example:

• A high-severity test failure could be framed as a regulatory reporting failure risk.
• A failed penetration test might indicate a client data breach risk.
• An unreliable system deployment could represent an operational continuity risk.

Developing this kind of shared vocabulary will help your QE teams to better communicate with your executives, risk managers and compliance leaders. It will also enable more meaningful dashboards that translate defects and test results into operational impact and potential loss.

Your QE leaders should engage with control owners, risk analysts and internal auditors during sprint planning or risk workshops. Collaborating early means testing efforts align more fluently with known control gaps and audit priorities.

Using business-relevant terminology in test artefacts, reports and presentations will increase QE influence and enable more constructive stakeholder engagement too. It will also help build trust, as your non-technical teams are more likely to support initiatives they can understand and relate to.

4. Case Study: QE and risk alignment in financial services

Consider the case of a UK-based investment bank undergoing a transformation of its online payments platform.

Initially, the bank’s QE team focused solely on automation coverage and regression testing. However, following several audit findings related to access controls and data privacy, the bank decided it needed to tighten up its internal controls.

So, the QE team worked collaboratively with their internal audit and compliance colleagues to map control requirements (e.g. GDPR) to specific user stories and test cases. They developed automated validation scripts to check for encryption, access control and logging standards. They also created an evidence library – complete with test logs, traceability matrices and screenshots – that auditors could access directly.

The outcomes included:

• A 60% reduction in compliance-related audit findings.
• Faster audit response times.
• Formal recognition of the QE team from senior risk stakeholders.

Crucially, this shift didn’t require new tools or any major reorganisation – just a mindset shift and closer cross-functional collaboration. QE became a visible and proactive part of the bank’s risk management ecosystem.

5. Practical steps for QE professionals

To align better with business risk and compliance teams, your firm’s quality engineers should be considering:

• Learning the basics of risk and control frameworks (e.g., GDPR, ISO 31000).
• Attending GRC and internal audit planning sessions.
• Embedding risk and control criteria in acceptance tests.
• Using language that relates to business impact, not just technical outcomes.
• Creating reusable artefacts that serve audit as well as development needs.
• Building relationships with control owners and compliance leads.

Strategic advocacy has always been at the core of quality engineering. In our industry, in which compliance and trust are paramount, QEs have an opportunity to embed themselves in the risk and governance fabric of their firm.

By aligning with compliance frameworks, collaborating on control design and speaking the language of business risk, your firm’s QEs can elevate their impact and influence.

This won’t just mean higher-quality software: you’ll also be developing a more resilient, compliant and transparent organisation.

Yes, it’s a transition that will demand new skills, closer collaboration and a willingness to look beyond traditional QE boundaries: but for those ready to make the leap, the rewards will include greater visibility, career advancement and the satisfaction of a critical role in business assurance.