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.