2018 was a special year for me as a professional, I had an opportunity to go to my first international conference Test Bash San Francisco, participate in many meetups and talk a lot about the role of the Tester/QA in Software Engineering.
2018 was an important year for me as a tester because it made me think a lot about what software quality really means and how we can contribute to building the best possible product. At first, the role of the tester was basically to check if the software meets the requirements and this was done manually, the quality was seen merely as a check. With agile came a great need to optimize how to test and reduce the delivery cycles, then began a high investment in test automation, processes, choice of tools and paradigm shifts. I believe this was the second wave of the role of tester.
A little later, when we started talking about the DevOps Culture, the importance of ensuring quality throughout the cycle with different types of tests, Continuous Integration and Monitoring was reinforced, but I feel that at that moment the role of tester ended up focusing too much on tools and forgetting that Quality is much more linked to the user’s perception of our product than to the use of techniques and tools alone.
For me, 2018 has been a year back to the origins of what software quality really is and how we can create incredible digital products that exceed user expectations, and the answer to that is to define a strategy that focuses on the different people that interact with our product. I believe this is a third wave that will stay for a while and again modify the behavior and contribution of the tester within a team.
Thinking of examples, imagine an e-commerce site that has millions of hits every week, it’s not enough to simply automate flow tests, such as adding to and buying a cart, to guarantee quality. One, two, ten concurrent users may even be able to make a successful purchase, but what if it’s a thousand? Just ensuring functionality without thinking about performance and scale is not enough.
I really liked a phrase I saw in Alan Page post: “the role of testing is to accelerate the achievement of shippable quality”, so we have to think about what helps us to carry out this role and help our companies to have a market differential, delivering quality software in short cycles.
Another point that marked a lot of 2018 (here in Brazil) was that companies began to look more towards accessibility and how much this is an inclusion tool for people who have some impairment. The testers also had to learn more about regulations and how to test for accessibility to ensure that a blind person, for example, can make
a purchase.
Talking about communities, it was also a year that strengthened the creation of Meetups in different capitals of Brazil, where I shared a lot of knowledge and exchange of experiences, I am very happy to see Brazilian testers coming together and sharing ideas.
Conclusion
It was a year of considerable reflection and much learning, which culminated in a change of job, I left a Brazilian Consulting and started 2019 in an American Product Company, where I’ll put all this learning into practice.
Another nice thing was my return as a writer, I hadn’t done many posts for a long time and in 2018 I was able to resume this habit of writing and sharing knowledge. If you want to know more about my posts and materials, everything is available on my site https://samantacicilia.com/
A great 2019 for all!
References
https://hackernoon.com/quality-attributes-in-software-architecture-3844ea482732
https://softwaretesting.cioreview.com/cxoinsight/the-cost-of-software-testing-nid-27746-cid-112.html
Author bio
Site: https://samantacicilia.com/
QA Manager at PayCertify, helping our team to define Quality Strategy to create an incredible product.
I am passionate about agility. I believe in empiricism, continuous improvement and diversity.
Co-founder of the Carioca Testing Group that is now part of Ministry Of Testing (https://www.meetup.com/ptBR/Ministry-of-Testing-Rio-de-Janeiro/) and organizer in MoT, São Paulo.
(https://www.meetup.com/ptBR/Ministry-of-Testing-Sao-Paulo/)
Articles of QA published in https://medium.com/@samantacicilia/and https://code.likeagirl.io/portugues/home