Quality Engineering

Can you give some examples?
Every company will approach quality engineering differently. How they practice it may depend on the maturity of their organisation. Process improvement Shifting-left Quality coaching Adopting a systems thinking approach.

What’s the value of quality engineering?
Quality engineering takes a more holistic approach. It looks at the system as a whole for risks and opportunities for improvement.

What are the pitfalls?
Quality Engineering is complex. It takes work, experimentation, understanding and practice to implement. 

In my experience working as a Quality Engineer, it has given me the opportunity to get involved in many of the same quality building activities I did as a Tester, but now people don't look at me weird, like I'm doing something strange and beyond my role.

Quality Engineering is technical leadership, and you can break that down fundamentally equal parts challenging, and supporting teams to deliver better products. Sometimes it's as simple as making space, and giving permissions for teams to challenge their existing processes, practices, tools, frameworks and design decisions. Sometimes it is about supporting them to make decisions, explore possible solutions or simply getting stuck in and completing work as part of the team.

Hang on, doesn't that sounds an awful lot like the job of an Engineering Manager, CTO, or Head of Engineering? Well, you'd be right, and all of those roles, and more, can support teams on their Quality Engineering journey, you need not always have a named "Quality Engineer". If you are lucky enough to have budget and capacity to bring in an expert in Testing and Quality, a QE can support one or more teams, and work hand-in-hand with other technical leaders.

Quality engineering is a proactive approach that steers towards preventing bugs over finding bugs. Its goal is to meet quality standards and customer expectations through the use of approaches, techniques, tools and processes that are used from the start to the end of the software delivery process.

Quality Engineering is a modern way of thinking about how we approach quality in software compared to more traditional software testing. Quality Engineering is about building quality into the software from the very beginning of development and can begin at the ideation stage. 

Think of it as a shift in emphasis from assess and review to guide and influence. While traditional software testing involves verifying the product against documented requirements, Quality Engineering is about integrating quality practices across the whole development process. This means getting involved early, collaborating closely with designers, developers and others to understand the requirements and thinking about the whole. Which could be systems thinking, from a holistic perspective or both. It is being involved in making sure that quality is baked into the software from the very beginning. This includes, but is not restricted to, using automation, not just for tests, but also for activities like static code analysis, security checks, and performance and system monitoring. All as part of the development flow or CI/CD pipelines depending on your context.

The core idea is to prevent bugs, rather than just finding them. Through taking a more holistic view of quality, and using systems thinking in considering aspects like performance, security, usability, accessibility and all quality characteristics as integral parts of the development process, we look to build quality in.