Boulder QA Meetup
Boulder QA Meetup - Discussion on CD
I recently visited with a group of software testers up in Boulder, Colorado to discuss peoples thought’s and feeling’s about Continuous Delivery. The trip highlighted that this conversation still covers unfamiliar ground among software developers and testers alike.
As a few of you are likely to acknowledge I have strong opinions on this subject. I purposely left my opinions at home, I wanted to observe the natural progression of the conversation among the group.
Open questions that the group identified:
- What tools/concepts/workflows exist that help projects move faster but ensure there isn’t a loss of product quality.
- Confusion about QA’s roles - with dev/ops fiercely in the limelight, what value and place does QA have on a project [specifically Manual testing].
- Will product quality degrade over time — how do we recognize if a loss of polish is occurring on projects.
The generic workflow makes sense to people from a hypothetical point of view, yet when they attempt to apply it to their work the conversation quickly stalls. I think in part because the mental leaps away from our comfort zone; both with letting go of perceived control and our old mental model of our roles on projects.
A big ake away from the Meetup was that it’s important to release ourselves from the percieved constraints of our job roles. The software development lifecyles is a forever evolving conversation and test engineering organziations are in a unique position to drive these conversations. Continuous delivery and continous deployment are mechanizms that test engineers can use to drive quality on increasingly complex products.