Industry Talk: Quality Assurance in an Agile Environment

27 May 2022 2:10 PM - 3:00 PM
Presenter/Speaker: Dr Derek Wong, Senior Test Analyst, TH2
Location: Online

It is my belief that everyone owns quality in an organisation—project managers, product owners,  developers and quality assurance (and a whole many more people). The key is open  communication between stakeholders in the product. Organisations that facilitate this  communication will more likely have reduced instances of issues in production causing embarrassment. The cost of remediating a defect found increases the further along the line that it is  found; by the time a bug has hit production, remediation is expensive not only from a financial but  also from a reputational standpoint. The earlier the defect is found, the better the outcome. The  quality assurance staff are not the only and last line of defence. I like to think that everyone on the  squad is on attack and defence! 

The presentation discusses the day to day of test analysts and software engineers in test in an Agile  environment and what expectations are in today’s Agile squads. Today’s quality assurance staff are  critical not just in performing test responsibilities but they also steer and develop process to  improve the product. Responsible quality assurance staff are consistently feeding back information  and opinions to development and product/project management that might decide whether a release might take place or that further development might need to be done.