Elevator Pitch
Shift-left has been a movement in recent past to meet the speed of Agility. But, in the DevOps world, it’s not enough - Extreme Shift-Left? What are the qualities that a tester needs to be successful? Let’s take a peek on how QE is changing to complement the blazing speed of Continuous Delivery.
Description
‘Moving Fast, Trying Not to Break Things’ - is the mantra in DevOps. Making sure everything else is working for a delta change, i.e. automated regression tests have proven to be effective to secure confidence in delivering Quality Features. However, it is very expensive in terms of skillset and continuous maintenance of flaky tests. While we addressed some of the challenges by shifting the testing focus to the LEFT and also, to the RIGHT, DevOps is a culture shift; it is not only process or tools or technologies. The paradigm shifted from bug detection to bug prevention; quality is no longer only the tester’s job, rather it is everyone’s responsibility to building cross-functional T-shaped team over well-defined specialized skilled contributors.
If your organization is taking up Digital Transformation initiatives now out of necessity, this talk is for you. Do you belong to a big financial or insurance corporation with thousands of employees, over years old legacy systems, outdated tools and technologies, and employees with over decades of business and functional expertise and limited QE or SDET skillset? You may be facing the problem of balancing between people vs process, institutional knowledge vs technology and how you can embrace the power of 3 Amigos. One of the themes is to practice engineering mindset and adopt developers’ technology to increase team velocity by contributing as T-Shaped Value Stream agile team. While there are several areas in which Quality Engineering practice is improving on, I will focus on how successful organizations are approaching Digital Transformation with API first mindset. This would be a work in progress solution to achieve continuous API testing using the concept of BDD and Karate DSL.
Join me while I share my experiences on how to communicate the change, motivate a team to accept the change, resourceful to implement the change and celebrate the change to ensure Speed, Reliability, Quantity, and Maintenance of test automation much needed for Continuous Delivery.
Notes
I have been practicing Quality Engineering over 14+ years and have gone through the path from being a manual tester arguing over a missing punctuation referring to the BRD in Waterfall delivery, taking the blame and/or the pride as to say final GO/NO GO, through practicing, implementing and strategizing in the Continuous X (Integration, Delivery, Testing, etc.) environment where Quality is everyone’s responsibility and success or failure shared by the team. Have learned and implemented several initiatives transitioning from a manual black box testing to Automated testing, and Automated testing to Autonomous testing.
With my exposure to the DevOps world by following some thought leaders, participating in some of the recent conferences and working with my DevOps colleagues at AIG, I realized this topic in DevOps Day would be a great fit to display that ‘quality is everyone’s responsibility’ and how everyone on the delivery team can contribute to the secure the highest level of quality product. I am based out at Houston and first time ever trying to speak to an audience other than Testers, and excited about the speaking opportunity, if considered by the DevOps Day selection committee. Thank you for your time reviewing my talk.