Quality Ownership
While technology has changed significantly and SDLCs overall have morphed with the advent of agile methodologies, quality processes have not kept pace. The problems we had 40 years ago are problems we still deal with every day. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Our standard processes didn't work very well 40 years ago and they don't work very well now. Quality Ownership is designed to take agile processes to a new level using shift left thinking prior to making tickets ready to work, using the expertise of the Quality Analyst to manage the quality landscape, the SDET staff to begin automation early, and the agile team itself to assume responsibility for quality as a team. Givelify has experimented with this methodology, we've learned a lot, and our results are exciting enough we would like to share them with the rest of the quality community. Our Quality Analysts are able to serve multiple teams (at a savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars), our quality levels in Production remain high, and our agile teams are better able to absorb last-minute changes to support our business.
Linda Wilkinson
Linda Wilkinson has been a QA practitioner for 40 years (!). She started her career in software analysis, moved into QA, and followed the traditional route of QA Analyst I, II, II, Senior, SDET, Lead, Manager, Director, VP, and took a few brief forays into DevOps, DBA, Product Management, and data analysis as it became necessary in order to accomplish quality goals. At last count, she has worked with 18 languages, helped author a book, and has had the privilege of speaking at a variety of conferences, both as a speaker and as a member of expert boards in QA and metrics. She has built QA teams (functional, automated, and performance) from scratch five times. Passionate about quality and providing business value, her teams have maintained error rates close to 1% with high customer satisfaction ratings in a highly competitive and ever-changing technical landscape.