In this moment:
Philippa Jennings
Yesterday I watched a talk by Phillipa Jennings and they asked us to imagine what type of gate we might be standing next to. For example saying "no" that can't go through the gate. "Yes" this can go through the gate. Pitching the idea of "dissolving a quality gate" through things like pairing with developers. It was very thought provoking. What does your gate look like? What can you do to dissolve the gate? How can we create quality as a system?
Melissa Fisher
Test Engineer
She/Her
Quality and Testing Specialist.
Gary Hawkes
Interestingly, we have a Quality Gate but its not really a gate that we police. Its in essence a 15 minute prod deployment review to make sure everyone is happy from their perspectives before we ship it. So at the very least it needs a rebrand.
However, the one gate that is prominent is as Phillipa mentioned, i.e. Agile...but testing after dev. We are moving in the right direction by doing more to influence quality earlier so that we need to test less but there's a journey to be had for sure.
Rosie Sherry
The Zen Gate: Does this pass the Aaahh Test? Does it make us feel good? Do we feel confident? Does it ease friction? Does it align with our vision? Does it simpify the system? Does it literally make us go 'aaahh'.
(We use this interally and have even have an Slack emoji react for it, it's like a nod of approval, or a 'yesssss')
Philippa Jennings
Thank you so much for celebrating my talk from PeersCon Melissa. I think it is incredible just how many gates we as testers are still standing next to -- where we are still acting as the guard between the 'work' and the 'world' as per when it was first introduced back in the 1970s.
We can keep trying to shift the gate by doing things earlier, but I firmly believe that we need to focus on Quality as a System, to underpin how we approach our products and our product quality from the start.
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