AMA Answer: How do the teams responsibilities in a bakery, align with a quality engineering team?

Upon my AMA about how baking a cake is the same as developping software moment Gary Hawkes asked "How do the teams responsibilities in a bakery, align with a quality engineering team?". Immediately I started imagining the bakers I worked with as members of my software development team and the other way around 🤣. So let me tell you how the different roles in the bakery match with the roles in a software engineering team.

My first thought went to developers who easily compare to bakers. But even more than just the basics: the distinction there is between back-end, front-end and full-stack devs also appears among bakers. For bakers that's bread bakers, pastry bakers and those that do it all. Allthough they lhave learned to do both, everyone has a clear preference. Just like front-end devs, pastry bakers spend as much time on the funcionality/flavor as on the way their product looks. Not to say that bread bakers don't make beautiful bread, but just like back-end devs: how it looks is less of a priority. 

Analysis is making sure the bakers now what to bake. Writing down the orders of customers, comparing with previous weeks, months, years to make sure there isn't too much of a shortage or surplus of product, preparing the order forms for the holidays, ...
DevOps is ordering all the ingredients, packaging, ... But also ordering new tools or scheduling the maintenance and repair person for the machines. 

Sales and customer support is provided by off course the persons in the shop who sell all the baked goodies to the masses. They restock when possible and handle the complaints.

Security engineering is cleaning and doing the dishes. Preventing fails from the health inspector and makign sure no contaminated food gets to the clients.

So where do the testers/QAs come in? Everywhere! It's checking if the delivered product to see if it's the right product and not over date yet. It's in every step of the bakign process, like cheking if the bread has risen enough before going into the oven, if the puff pastries are baked enough (and not too much), it's checking if the whipped cream has the right consistency for piping and tasting the pudding to see if they didn't forget to add the sugar. It's goign over all the prodcuts made for that day to see if everything is there for the customer orders and the shop. It's double checking the table filled with yule logs to see if they all have a chocolate plack wishing people happy holidays. 

Let me know if there is a role I forgot to compare 😉