Mock interview

 https://youtu.be/Jm6FHfodSbg

Testing is a cog in the QA machine

 Tell me I'm wrong? Testing is only a cog in the quality machine. There are so many other aspects of what is comprised of quality, user experience being the first that comes to mind that may be exposed by testing but is still something that must be reflected on if we're talking quality. Telemetry is another; how are we measuring the thing that matter when it comes to quality? 

 IT QA is NOT the same as Software QA

Falling back and building back up

In 2017 I was determined to leave IT finance; I had enough of Banking and Mortgage, so I took a nice long break spent time w/ the family and our new one year old. And found my dream job; I mean literally after interviewing I had literal dreams of working there; walking on the bluffs and solving complex software quality engineering problems, (don't judge my dreams). 

Over the course of 2018 my commute was over an hour long even with a few speeding tickets, BUT it was worth it. I loaded up every leadership book I could listen too and bought in hook line and sinker to my new gig's philosophy went from 1990's on premise infrastructure  all .NET with Test Professional, Selenium web driver/C# and MS Office to AWS, ruby, Cyprus, jira, confluence and Google office. The rate of learning, lack of sleep and stress had my my skin break out in eczema that a still have today, i had put on weight, even though we had on-site yoga and gyms w/ my commute I would sacrifice the work out to see the family, I knew I had just a year to do this before we could find a place closer and move, which the awesome company I worked for was paying for. 

By the start of 2020 we moved into our new place w/  my commute 20 minutes away and my wife working from home we were set to crush the next 5 to 10 years; until the pandemic and getting laid off. My first week to work and was meeting w/ our new VP of Data when we got the news that we've all be working remote till this pandemic blew over.  And by July we could see the writing on the wall engineering pivoted to an SDET model and 80% of QA was let go including myself. 

And of course no one likes being let go in the middle of a pandemic but I took my severance, my stocks and got another gig BACK in mortgage and Finance without missing a day of work  or change in salary. 

A year later 2021, and I'm CRUSHING what I do but back in an industry that I could barely wake up too and head to WORK just a few years earlier and a pandemic later. 

Who's wants to engineer testing verses those that want to engineer quality?

 

Who's wants to engineer testing verses those that want to engineer quality? 

Testing is NOT Quality, only ONE tool to reflect your product's quality. 

• QA = Quality Advocacy
• QE = Quality Engineering 
• SDET = Software Developer Engineering in Test 

Tested approved and failed in production; why implementation is hard

To many projects are tested and verified, signed off on by users and rolled to production with nothing but issues, why? and what can IT do about it. There are several methods for moving new products to production, like turning the test bed into Production, (though one needs to know this prior to the build out of the environment, else pitfalls will arise). 

So, planning is the easy answer to this but how do you know to plan for scale and sustainability? Trust in your product and IT team. For these are the folks that, 'know' the environment and product lifecycle. 

What Happens in Production stays in Production....

Quality Assurance, Change Management and Application Support, Or the back half of continuous development.

Software products that are tested to meet the business/product owner needs and then moved without disruption, to production and supported for its life cycle ; you end up with a stable, sustainable model to move continuously and quickly on industry changes.

When you've built a QA Team and a CM Team with the right people and process the technology becomes an awesome tool to support and make the work easy.