Scaling Software Development Teams through QA Automation

You’ve done it! You’ve hit it big and your team is growing. Fast. With QA automation, your team will keep up with wave after wave of demands from customers, executives, and product managers. In this talk, we discuss how to use QA automation as a force multiplier to enable high velocity continuous delivery for your high-quality product. You will learn about:

• The test pyramid from unit tests at the bottom to end-to-end testing at the top.
• Benefits for developers, testers, dev-ops, and customers.
• The best tests to automate and how.
• Pitfalls that might prevent you from fully benefitting from QA automation.

Time-to-market, product agility, profitability, and quality are all improved through embracing QA automation. Developers commit higher quality code because they test locally as they develop, integration tests are more comprehensive and run with greater frequency, and QA engineers are freed to do more creative and interesting test activities than running the same test scripts for the millionth time.

Using unit, component, integration, and end-to-end test automation allows your team to test at every stage: development, code commit, build pipeline, feature and integration testing, and deployment. There are a few instances where QA automation might not be a good fit for your organization but, everywhere else, it drastically improves your product quality, quality of life, and customer satisfaction.

Justin Wolf

Justin Wolf has worked in software engineering since 1988 as developer, architect, product manager, and engineering manager. His employers have ranged from game companies, to government contractors, to computer networking giants. At his current employer, he manages a team of server and embedded device software engineers to provide home network management solutions to large Internet service providers. These SaaS products help service providers support their millions of customers to reduce cost and improve retention. He enjoys aviation and sailing in his spare time and lives in southwest Washington with his wife, daughter, and pets.

Damien Macielinski

Damien is currently a QA Automation Manager at Powin where he leads teams to automate testing across the testing pyramid. Damien holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan and a M.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University. He lives in Tualatin with his wife and two daughters.
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