Today might be dedicated to love, but software is underpinning the celebration. Gifts have been ordered (or are being ordered) online, reservations are being made through websites, and rides are being called through applications. As unwelcome as software bugs generally are, they’re a quick way to kill a special moment for customers today.
Quality Means Caring for Customers, Developers, and Quality Engineers
Optimizing software development pipelines for quality through quality engineering is an effective way to show customers that your team is responsive to their needs. Studies have shown that teams who focus on software testing and quality engineering are more likely to accelerate deployment frequency, have higher user satisfaction, and less stressful deployments. The key to unlocking these more productive delivery cycles: empowering testers to build a culture of quality.
Show testers (and your customers) that your team cares about quality with these best practices.
Recognize The ‘Breaking’ Mindset
Software testers have a unique role in the software development organization. They need to be highly empathetic, collaborative, and also apply an outside perspective to their company’s product. Unlike a developer, who’s focused on building new features, testers must be focused on how to break it. It’s a different mindset and a different skill set that ensures users have the best experience possible.
For better or worse, focusing on how to break an application or website often involves delivering bad news. Tests fail, defects are found, and there’s work to be done. This process can leave everyone frustrated, or it can foster a culture of support and improvement. One of the most impactful ways to show your quality team that you care is contributing to processes that enable cross-functional collaboration, even when addressing stressful or challenging defects. Recognize that your software testers are bringing a valuable perspective to the product that only improves quality and customer retention, which helps the entire company succeed.
Test Early and Often in Development
Few things are more stressful than discovering numerous issues right before a delivery deadline. When a pile of tickets are filed in the final stages of development, QA is often left scrambling to test fixes, help engineers understand test results, and make sure the upcoming feature meets customer expectations.
When testing starts early in the development process, defects are more likely to be discovered earlier. Not only does this reduce the stress of fixing the bug, but early-stage software defects are usually easier to investigate and resolve. Developers can start the quality engineering process at the very beginning of the SDLC by running automated API and end-to-end tests as soon as they save their project. This ensures that any APIs being used are working as intended and that code meets quality standards from the onset. Developers can build new products with confidence, and quality engineers are less likely to face a deluge of errors under deadline.
Contribute to a Culture of Quality
A culture of quality means that everyone contributes to quality. This not only includes building effective collaboration practices and testing early in development, but also means valuing testing as a strategic part of the development organization. Your entire team should understand the purpose of testing, how test coverage reflects the user experience, and how quality can improve delivery pipelines. Quality pros are part of sprint planning, advise developers on testing strategies, and are part of sprint post-mortems designed to help everyone improve. Though a growing share of software development teams are elevating testing and turning to quality engineering as a strategic partner in the enterprise, the 2022 Testing in DevOps Report shows that we still have progress to make.
Given the powerful impact of testing on DevOps adoption, CI/CD, and the customer experience, it’s clear that showing QE you care is the right thing to do for any software organization.
Quality is Everyone’s Love Language
It might be obvious, but it’s worth repeating: everyone loves applications and websites that are easy-to-use and work reliably. As you order a ride, make your reservation, and have your Valentine’s Day gifts arrive on time, remember that quality is the foundation for better software development. Show your quality team and your customers that you care by finding new ways to integrate testing into the SDLC and always improving product quality.
Start your journey to quality engineering with mabl’s two-week free trial. See how scalable low-code test automation makes it easy to show your customers that your team cares.
