A little less testing, a little more quality

25-minute Talk

Sometimes what we need for quality isn't testing at all.

Virtual Pass session

Timetable

4:00 p.m. – 4:45 p.m. Thursday 16th

Room

Room F2 - Track 2: Talks

Audience

Pretty much anyone wh's curious about roles in quality and testing.

Key-Learnings

  • Learn where testing fits in our pursuit for quality and how its impact on quality is limited.
  • Understand how to think about quality risks and how to address them in other ways than testing.
  • Get to know other disciplines you may pursue to develop yourself as a quality professional and more than a tester.

I've done testing in various forms throughout my career. Automated, exploratory, scripted, you name it! Over the years though, I've been through situations where even with all the testing in the world we couldn't quite avoid serious quality problems with the software we were releasing. Have you ever been in such a situation as well? Or is it something you haven’t considered before?

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that software testing is an integral part of our pursuit for quality but is often not enough. I have several personal stories to tell! Like the time I realised that we needed shorter release cycles for faster feedback loops. Ultimately, that required a change in the architecture of the product.

There was also the time we changed our release strategy to progressively roll out new features to customers, so that we could increase our confidence on the software we were shipping. Or even the time I had to redirect my attention to the way developers were working and behaving, rather than just looking at how testing was being done.

With all of them, I learned how quality is a byproduct of various disciplines and not just necessarily of extensive testing. And in retrospect, this made me think of myself as more than an expert in testing, but as a quality engineer.

In this talk, I'll go deeper into this topic and share some of those stories. I will tell you how I reason about quality risks and how to choose between doing some form of testing or something completely different. Rest assured though, this talk is not in any way against testing. It's about how testing should be done at the right places and at the right time, and how sometimes what your team needs isn't testing at all!

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