The changing role of a QA

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Traditional Manual QA

| Common practice for QA & development teams to be separate

| Heavy focus on manual testing

| QA’s were seen as “the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff”

| Highlighting all the problems at the last minute

| In this Waterfall environment, projects could take months or even years to go Live

| Minor changes would lead to change management requests and “feature” vs. defect arguments

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Current situation

| Lengthy projects are considered dinosaurs of the industry

| Teams are no longer being separated by discipline and the focus on automation

| Companies live and die on their speed-to-market

| It would be unthinkable to wait days or even weeks to release due to a slow Software Delivery Lifecycle

| Reducing cycle times and deploying into production frequently is called Continuous Delivery (CD)

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So how does a company decrease their cycle time?

| Creating autonomous teams that are empowered to make decisions

| Teams no longer have specialists

| Everyone is a “jack of all trades”

| Developers build code, test and deploy to production

| This is also known as DevOps

| Coupled with Continuous Integration (CI), drastically reduces cycle time compared to more traditional methods of delivery

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Continuous Integration

| CI is the practice where developers commit their code into a shared repository and automated tests are run to see if that change has broken anything

| Only if all tests pass then the code is merged

| There is also a large automation set of regression tests that are run before any code is deployed into Production

| CI tests should take minutes at most and the complete regression shouldn’t take more than an hour

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Minimum Viable Testing

| Testing just enough to decrease cycle time

| With the key word being “viable’’

| Key functionality needs to be covered - things that the business cannot take the risk of not working correctly

| But no exhaustive testing of every feature

| Traditionally these tests were run manually, which did not give the speed or repeatability

| This results in the requirement of test automation

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Who automates these tests?

| Typically, the CI tests (mainly unit and integration level) are automated by the developers

| The regression tests (mainly end-to-end and UI driven) are automated by the QA team

| However, there has been an increasing trend towards developers automating these too

| Striving to become more cross-functional, reduce bottlenecks and cycle time

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The future of QA’s in Technology

| There is a future for QA’s, even if the developers are automating all of the CI and regression tests

| Just not in the traditional sense of doing manual, end-of-the-line testing

| There are many ways that a QA can stay relevant in this shifting market

| QA’s should be working closely with the developers

| In the same notion of pair-programming, they could start doing “pair-testing”

| In order to write automated tests with the developers.

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QA Goals

| Ensuring that quality is built in from the beginning

| Encouraging practices such as Test Driven Development

| A tester’s mind-set is very different to a developer’s, which often allows a QA to identify problem areas more easily

| QA’s should be training developers to think outside the box

| And ensuring that they’re thinking of different scenarios while they’re developing

| In theory, this should mean that fewer bugs are developed

| Making the whole SDLC faster and more efficient

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QA Focus Shift

| With QA’s having a reduced workload due to developers taking on additional responsibility, QA’s can start shifting focus on areas of testing other than system functionality

| QA’s should be shifting focus onto non-functional testing

| Areas such as performance and security should be explored

| As well as real usability testing and facilitate crowd or beta testing

| To prove that you are building the right thing, and not just building the wrong thing correctly

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The need for QA| There is and probably always will be the need for exploratory testing in-house, which

requires a QA’s mind

| This again should be kept to “minimum viable testing”

| QA’s should also look into the analytics behind what’s being developed; e.g. what browsers or device customers are using and then ensure that testing and development targets this

| This is an area often forgotten during development that can result in poor usability if not given adequate attention

| There are countless ways of improving the quality of a system, these example are just a few, and this is where a QA can truly bring value to the SDLC

| Improving quality, increasing efficiency and reducing cycle time

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The survival of QA

| The notion of a QA in the traditional sense is going away

| However, by changing and adapting their way of working to stay relevant they can ensure they are providing value

| Training developers to think like a QA

| Improving testing practices

| Pushing ahead with non-functional testing

| And striving to improve quality and efficiency wherever possible

| This will help to ensure that the role of a QA continues to be relevant

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Other opportunities for QA’s

| Taking on dual roles such as:- Scrum Master- Business Analyst

| Knowledge gained in working as QA can lend itself particularly well in these areas

| Knowledge gained in working as QA can lend itself particularly well in these areas

| And on the other bring added value to the organization

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Will QA stay a factor in the future?

| The role of a traditional manual tester will likely go the way of the typewriter

| But not a single business out there can honestly say that their software is perfect

| And as long as that continues to be the case, there will always be the need for QA

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