How To Make A Meaningful Impact On Quality In Your Organization
About Me
My name is Matt Gilbert and I have been in the Software Testing field for close to 10 years now. I have my B.S. in Software Development from Western Governors University. I’ve had the opportunity to take on many different roles in varying industries like Insurance, Startups, SaaS, Healthcare, as well as contract work. Across these different industries, I also gained experience with several different testing techniques. These include API testing, Integration, Performance, Accessibility, UI, Usability, Mobile, Contract, as well as Test Automation Framework development in Java, C#, Typescript, and Python. You can find me on LinkedIn. Let’s connect!
Intro
Whether you are a new Test Engineer or a seasoned vet, hopefully, we can come to an understanding about where your role begins on a Scrum team, within an organization, and how you can begin to make a positive impact outside of the typical “Sprint” ceremonies. Below, we will go over a few areas you can begin to insert yourself and a few questions to ask as you progress.
Roadmap Development
Hopefully, your team has a roadmap, and if not, this is highly beneficial for everyone on the team as it gives them a sense of what to expect in the coming weeks or months. Having this “vision” gives the entire development team time to think about, process, and prepare for the upcoming work. This is the perfect time to start asking questions about the features in the roadmap, and getting ahead of the curve. Both business and technical questions are fair game at this point.
Documentation Improvement
Have you seen what the Product Requirement Documents look like? What about the functional documentation? Are there scenarios that could be given some extra thought? How would a user react to this new functionality? What would they expect from it from a behavioral perspective? What are the performance or security risks? Has there been any thought around accessibility? These are all questions you can ask your Product team and hopefully come up with a better understanding of the functionality and more detailed requirements for your team.
Pipeline Release Process
What does your release process look like? How early is testing done and what type? Do you have unit tests? If so, what does the code coverage look like? Is the team using any static analysis tools? Is there an opportunity to add some integration tests? What about at the UI layer? The testing process within DevOps is crucial, and all of these questions need to be given consideration. The DevOps Continuous Lifecycle consists of:
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Testing
Continuous Deployment (CD)
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous Feedback, Improvement, and Innovation
At each of these steps, there are opportunities to add value, raise the quality of the software, and increase the confidence of the team. Analyze your release pipeline and see where the quality gaps could be filled.
Outro
Thanks for reading! This was a shorter article, but hopefully, it gives you a sense of where you can get started.
Keep on the lookout for my next article!