Tutorial

The tutorial is intended to give testers a practical introduction to the key concepts of quality engineering. It’s split into a number of sessions. Each session has a theoretical introduction followed by exercises where we try to apply the ideas.

The tutorial begins with a discussion about what quality is. The goal of this section is to expand our mindset away from thinking primarily about whether a system works as designed, which is only one aspect of quality, towards thinking about quality as the value of the solution for people that matter. This requires us to consider four other aspects of quality. The main practical exercise for this session is for the attendees to consider what quality means for different stakeholders of a feature. This is then expanded to thinking about risks and generating test ideas for our test strategy.

The next session is a discussion about why very often we still find testing being performed only at the end of the SDLC – even in Agile environments. There are some good reasons for this, but we will show that it makes our working lives a lot harder and more stressful overall. This will lead us to an introduction of quality engineering as a better approach.

There are then three sessions, each dedicated to one of the three key aspects of quality engineering.

• Early and continuous detection of quality issues. Here we will consider different static and dynamic testing techniques. We will also talk about how the principle of the test pyramid can be applied in multiple contexts – not only test automation -as well as being the enabler of continuous testing.

• Prevention of quality issues. Here we will first talk about why mistakes can be made and what we can do to help prevent them. One key topic in this session is improving understanding and solving problems through collaborative techniques. We will also talk about introducing quality gates, applying better standards and using more suitable tools.

• The final session is about building quality in by continuously improving processes and people. Not only will we dip into Deming, we will also quickly look at some of the principles of Lean.

An underlying topic throughout the workshop is the collaboration behaviours that are vital for quality engineering to get traction in a team.

Target group

Prerequisites