How Quality Engineering will Change your Organization?

First, let's clarify what quality engineering is. Quality engineering (QE) is the process of testing, analyzing and improving software quality throughout the application development cycle. This differs from the traditional quality assurance that accompanies the end of the software development process in a world dominated by waterfalls. In contrast to quality assurance, errors are not only prevented, but also recognized. InfoStretch prioritizes more descriptive and exciting "quality engineering services" over "agile testing" and "continuous testing" which seem tight.

Why Quality Engineer Is Important?

Today, QE is becoming increasingly important as we become agile and DevOps dominate the world.

In these two development movements, quality is the responsibility of everyone involved and is theoretically optimized throughout the process. This has its own strengths and weaknesses.

The biggest benefit is that everyone is responsible for creating quality code, thanks to the accuracy and discipline associated with Agile or DevOps. Paradoxically, this is also the main disadvantage. If something is everyone's responsibility, isn't it someone's responsibility? If you've had a college roommate, remember when someone said, "Let's get rid of it every day." How well did it work after the first few days or weeks?

In software development at company level, QE routinely involves agile and DevOps users. As for testing, the thinking of Waterfall seems tired of Agile and DevOps. Instead of quality assurance at the end of the development cycle, quality assurance is often performed on the next iteration. According to a Forrester report, only 13% of agile adapters ran agile tests, as recognized as of September 2013.

Without the continued inclusion of a disciplined quality regime throughout the Agile or DevOps process, the quality of the product will eventually deteriorate and a significant transition to Agile or DevOps will be meaningless. “Hey, the product doesn't work very well, but we released it early.” That doesn't sound like the spirit development managers want to admit.

What Are The Advantages Of Quality Engineering?

With QE, the main benefit of the application development cycle is that you can actually realize all of the proposed benefits of Agile and DevOps. As explained above, fast, poor quality products are not useless to anyone. The collaboration between developers and testers is also more realistic and largely corresponds to the agile spirit. Testers need to be involved at the start of the cycle to establish a testing framework and environment that depend on all future sprints.

When done correctly, QE can significantly speed up testing. QE is based on test automation rather than manual testing. It's hard to imagine a QE feature that doesn't focus on test automation. It also increases the speed and flexibility of the entire development cycle when done correctly. This should test all layers and all integrations that can be tested, not just functional and non-functional tests. The rest of the manual tests can be much more creative and exploratory.

Quality engineering not only has a dramatic effect on a company's results, but also on people, processes and tools. We'll come back to this in a later post.