Adventures of a developer who suddenly found himself in the role of head of QA. Presentation as held at ACCU 2010 (I think - had to recreate it from the last draft after I lost my laptop on the Eurostar in the ensuing volcanic chaos on the way back from Oxford).

1. Adventures in QA
Dirk Haun
ACCU Conference 2010

2. Prelude

3. About me
• For the longest time:
Developer in C, C++
• Surprise career move
to QA
• Amateur in QA

4. Company Profile
• Document conversion
• Large scale
• Highly portable C
• Some Java

5. Important Features
• Performance
• Resources
• Quality
• Usability (in progress)
• not so much: Security

6. Motivation

7. "Das ging doch
schon mal?!"

8. "But this used
to work?!"

9. My First Regression Test Suite

10. Career

11. Career Path

12. Corporate Siberia

13. The Job

14. "Make it work"

15. Develop Test Ship

16. Develop Test Ship
improve here

17. Wiggle Room only

18. 3 Departments in 1

19. C vs. Java

20. Infrastructure

21. Old Hardware

22. Time to run tests

23. Storage

24. Intermission
Some feedback from my helpful audience

25. Ideas from the Audience
• Partioning - find the essential tests
• Reduce release frequency for some of
the platforms
• Try differential pricing per platform

26. Ideas from the Audience
• Don‘t just set up rules (guidelines,
directives), but explain why
• How do new people learn the rules?
Try storytelling or mentoring
• Test the rules

27. Ideas from the Audience
• Get stakeholders involved, e.g.
customers
• Get an outsider‘s view, e.g. from a
consultant

28. Changes

29. Quality as #3 problem

30. New Boss

31. Communication

32. New Rules

33. Theory vs. Practice

34. "Every new feature
should have a test"

35. "This feature
has to be
in the next version"

36. Continuous Integration

37. Breaking the Build
• acting on failed tests
• figuring out who
broke the build
• time-consuming
• whose
responsibility is it?
• running the unit tests
before committing

38. Test Ownership

39. New tests
• Providing test data
• Adding the tests

40. Outlook

41. New Projects

42. Does everybody "get" it yet?

43. What about me?

44. (Some)
Lessons Learned

45. Test Communities
do exist

46. Change takes time
- a lot of time

47. QA needs a
"holistic" approach

48. Test automation
- The Holy Grail?

49. The End?

50. Credits
• Photos via flickr.com, thanks to:
Hopkinsii, lotyloty, seier+seier,
Alex Polezhaev, Horia Varlan,
Caterina Fake, Steve Jurvetson,
Stig Nygaard, Steve Punter,
Peter Dutton, paul posadas, Erik
Pitti, Nick J Webb, Bill Gantz,
Jukka Zitting, Kevin Dooley,
Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, Matti
Mattila, Rebecca Krebs,
mollybob, Matt Brown, Bob
Bobster, James Bowe, Bhumika
Guglani, manuki
• Photos and names are links -
click them!