My Imperfect Journey to the Whole Team Owning Quality - Francis Ho

We often hear success stories about shifting QA left; to have the mindset of preventing bugs rather than finding bugs, or that the entire product team is responsible for quality. I’ve always found them inspiring, so when I was given the opportunity to lead and define how we do QA at my company, an expanding startup with a growing engineering team, I set out on the journey to experience for myself this utopia where QA isn’t just about gatekeeping.

 

Four years later at my company, we no longer perform full manual regression tests before every release but are now deploying to production dozens of times a day without the need for human gatekeepers.

 

In this talk let me take you through our journey towards that utopia, what happened along the way, and how I battled between the desire for shared ownership of quality and the reassurance from hands-on QA testing before releases that is deeply embedded in me, because that’s just what’s expected of QA folks. A QA that doesn’t do any testing before releases, or sometimes even new features? What am I here for then?

 

This is a real story of how it unfolded. It is not a perfect journey, but it is ours.