The changing role of a QA | QualiTest Group

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
2

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)
3

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
4

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
5

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
6

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
7

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.
8

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
9

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
10

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
11

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
12

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
13

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
14

www.QualiTestGroup.com
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The changing role of a QA | QualiTest Group

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