A success story on transforming quality inside out in software companies
Recently, I wrapped up my gig in Freelancer.com as a Director of Quality. In this maiden post of mine, I would like to share what is quality engineering and provide a brief glimpse on how the quality engineering journey has taken place from Day 1 to Day 314 in Freelancer.com.
What is Quality Engineering ?
In my view, it is referring to the engineering practices which focuses on Quality aspects from the time Product is been ideated to product development, delivery of the products and beyond the products delivered to the customers.
In my career of software testing over the last 15 years, Quality team often bear the misconception of being a gate keeper (blocker) to the software deliverables. The Quality team often has the preconception that they are the second class citizen because they only know how to “test”. Often, the team is always been made as scape goat by stakeholders when things go wrong but NOT when things are sailing.
How do we calibrate, change and shift the above mentioned attitude ?
- Quality is EVERYONE responsibility
Gone are the days where Quality team is the team who is waiting for the specific build or releases to be supplied to test. Gone are the days where Quality team is THE team who responsible to find and lodge the bugs. Instead, Quality is driven by the Quality team (see the second point for more details) but the responsibility of Product Quality still falls on everyone in the team.
2. Quality starts from the culture embedded in the team driven by Quality Engineers
Quality culture DNA is very important and it all starts from the top; from test strategy, quality initiatives, trainings and the DNA is consistent throughout the Product development life cycle. Even though Quality is everyone responsibility, Quality team still bears the ultimate ownership in driving the quality activities and being quality advocates among the organisation. Quality team is the one who questions, probing requirements, reviewing unit tests written by developers, self driven to write integration tests and E2E tests with fellow developers in the team, providing test notes to the team (on what has/not covered, risks after the testing activities has concluded).
Most importantly, the Quality culture is supported by the top stakeholders and working alongside to ensure everyone is on board with the expectations on/from Quality team to make it a success.
3. Quality DOES NONT stop at ensuring the delivered software functionality works
Quality is not only limited to the user stories or functionality of the software works. It is beyond the product functionality where we ask the following questions, such as,
a. How does the software look feel, to me as a customer persona ?
b. How does the software perform under different scenarios, as customer point of view ?
c. How does the software handle the error when it hit certain corner cases as a customer point of view ? Does the software self-recover when the specfici scenario is hit ?
I would like to wrap up the post with a brief glimpse of the specific quality transformation journey in Freelancer.com below :-
Day 1
- Testing very heavily focused on manual testing
- Frequent bugs and issues occurrence on Production
- Tendency of the blame culture on the Quality team whenever there was issue in Production
- No visibility /clarity on what testing activities involved
- Quality culture did not exists
Day 314
- Testing is split up to manual exploratory testing, and automated testing (on Staging and Production)
- Internal Quality SLA setup for observability testing
- Synergy created between QE-PM-Product Engineers
- Quality coach roll out across the organisation
- Shift left testing mindset
Till then, I will expound more on the challenging yet fulfilling journey in my next post !
