Building Quality - Mesut Durukal

Airs on April 20th at 12AM (EDT)

After joining or starting a new project, there is a long and tricky way to build a QA process from scratch. Building a proper quality assurance environment can be achieved by collaboration with all the parties in the team. After talking to product owners, development members, and project leaders, many initiatives can be started to improve products and processes like feature housekeeping, maintaining testability, reducing flakiness, and test breakage. Achieving all these is not a piece of cake. As a tester, sometimes you must act like a quality coach, be dedicated, and encourage people to partner with you in the initiatives. You should do various benchmarking studies and analyze the results to understand the pros and cons. You should explain your intentions and goals tirelessly.

I have collected what challenges we encountered and how we solved them to have a reliable quality environment in various projects:

• How we managed to test a complex and complicated SUT

• How we managed releases

• How we reduce testing efforts before shipment

• How we maintain the stability of CI/CD.

A few of the solutions we applied are as follows:

• Define processes like Bug Life Cycle and Test Case Life Cycle

• Build Workflows like Code Review Guidelines, Acceptance/Exit Criteria

• Decide Tools: Issues, Tasks, Tests, Results, Code

• Maintain Tests: Coverage, Suite Management, Markers

• Automation: Implement the skeleton: Flexible enough for further improvements, Robust and open for RCA, Reporting

• Define Levels and Subsets: Priorities for the executions