Workshop 4A | Testing Beyond Testing – Using Transformative Power of Testing to Cultivate True Culture of Quality by Lalitkumar Bhamare

When you think of “Software Quality Engineering” – what comes to your mind? Typically, one’s mind gets clouded with words like automation, continuous testing, automated quality gates, CI/CD, observability, SonarQube, DORA metrics, SRE, and so on. While all these things that appear to the mind are important, is organizational investment in tooling and tech enough to deliver quality software?

Speaker:

Have a look at some famous quotes by Jerry Weinberg.

• Quality is value to some person. And value means what they are willing to sacrifice or pay to achieve it.

• No matter what they tell you at first, it is always a people problem.

• No matter how chaotic it sounds, everyone is only trying to help.

Problems with the quality of the software typically mean the software is in trouble. Weinberg’s three quotes mentioned above give us some idea of why software gets in trouble. And also, a way to think about minimizing those troubles. Engineering solutions for software quality are just a tiny part of the big scheme of things when it comes to delivering quality software.

To minimize the problems around software quality, it is important to understand what quality means in the software-building context. To build software products and deliver them on time without compromising on quality, it is important to understand the notions of quality and the relationship between them. At the same time, it is also important to understand how to bring all the decisions about quality into the consciousness of everyone involved in software building.

This hands-on practical training is designed around “Quality Conscious Software Delivery” – an award-winning framework developed by Lalit Bhamare (EuroSTAR Best Paper 2022 award) which emphasizes the importance of software testing as a cognitive and social activity. Lalit believes that investing in testing education for the whole team, socialising testing craft in the team, and using that learning to foster the quality mindset, enabling people and processes to support quality work at every stage is the way to go forward.

This four-hour workshop is about understanding the essentials of the award-winning QCSD framework. Participants will learn the four stages of the QCSD framework i.e. Enable, Engage, Execute, and Evaluate for quality-conscious software delivery.

Key takeaways

• Objective 1 Learning how to “Enable” – people and projects for quality (mindset, skills, critical thinking, and culture)

• Objective 2 Learning how to “Engage” people – for quality through pairing, collaboration, risk storming, continuous testing, etc.

• Objective 3 Learning how to “Execute” and “Evaluate”- for quality with clean and testable code, improving testability, skilled testing with an effective strategy, automating checks, continuous discovery, and continuous feedback through monitoring and alerts, etc