Mark Dordel: Quality is about conversations

In this episode of Leading With Quality, Rosie Sherry speaks with Mark Dordel, Senior Software Quality Advocate at Olo. Mark shares why he believes that quality is built through conversations. He shows how small, visible habits help teams ship safer software and avoid late-night "incidents".

Mark outlines Olo’s whole-team quality approach: developers own the testing, while quality advocates coach, plan, and make risk visible. He shows how Amigo sessions, epic test plans, and living runbooks turn tickets into shared understanding. He also explains the owner-operator model and the rotating support-captain role that keeps reliability front and centre.

You’ll hear about:

• Choosing the right place to test: local, staging, or production checks
• When to use pairing, ensemble, or swarming on higher-risk changes
• How specialist contract testers can act as product SMEs in complex systems
• Why many former SDETs at Olo moved into developer roles

If you want practical ways to raise quality without slowing teams down, this conversation will help.