Christina Thalayasingam – Medidata Solutions Inc.
Many teams aim only in having a bug free system. How can you make your team believe in delivering the true quality of the end product? How can you drive your team to understand that skipping non functional testing like performance and security testing could lead to the breach of your product quality ? How can you make them understand the importance of CI/CD in the testing lifecycle? How can you pour the passion into them to move forward to make a change? Setting up a team that has these skills could make this possible, but do they believe in what they do? How can you make them actually feel the essence of quality being a culture that does not focus alone on reporting bugs? Let us discuss ways on making your team walk in the path of Full Stack Testing, so that the team knows their vision and the mission.
The team should move into a position where any member of the team can understand the testing requirements of the application and execute them. Drive the entire quality team to understand the skills that each of them possess. To understand this, let’s look at what traditional QA practice is. There are several areas and types when it comes to Quality Assurance – Testing, Test Automation, Performance, etc. Generally, there are teams specialized in each of these areas executing each of these test types. Here we need to be able to pick anyone from the quality team to be able to cover any of the above test types. Similar to the rise of full stack engineering that brought the end of specialized front-end and back-end developers, and brought about the age of engineers that can build a product end to end independently, the time for QA to follow suit is near.
Full-stack quality engineers are individuals capable of working on all aspects of quality across all the application’s layers, using different testing methods. They will think about the many different aspects of product quality, such as functionality, usability, performance, security etc, and will also be familiar with test automation strategies and technologies. The full-stack QE will have a rich mix of domain knowledge, technical skills, and testing expertise. This is the trend that quality engineering is flowing into today. This talk will cover how we can get our teams to explore this venture.
Christina Thalayasingam, 2020 Technical Presentation, Paper, Slides
