Welcome to another episode of Automation Explanation, an Agile Thought Podcast, where you will learn about quality through automated testing and its place in modern software development.

This week, your hosts, Antwan Maddox and Greg Burdick are discussing Quality and who is responsible for it. They start by addressing the origins of Quality Assurance and dive deep into the differences between Quality Assurance and Quality Control. Antwan and Greg share valuable analogies for a better grasp of the meaning and extent of Quality Assurance as well as they speak of the most common mistakes in this field and how to prevent them.

Key Takeaways

• The origins of Quality assurance.
• • The notion of ensuring quality starts before the Industrial Revolution.
  • Before the free market, vendors could just sell anything, usually involving cutting corners in order to cut costs.
  • In the early years of the software age, in order to release what was considered good software at that time, different attributes were involved: Ease of installation, configuration, and friendliness. They believe if certain standards were followed there was no need for quality insurance.
  • In the 90s and early 2000s, there was a shift in customer perception in terms of change management, how quickly consumers can make updates, and efficiency in distributing new versions of software through the internet.
• How significant is it to be good at Quality Assurance in software development?
• • The role of Quality is amazing and it will continue to grow.
  • The organization overall is responsible for quality.
• Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control:
• • Quality assurance is making sure that the appropriate processes and procedures are there to enable a product or service to meet some level of quality, involving outputs and inputs.
  • Quality Control is about ensuring that you are meeting the already agreed Quality standards and one way of doing it is by testing.
  • Everyone within the environment is responsible for making sure all the elements and processes are been followed to deliver a successful outcome in providing a product that can be consumed.
• Externalities: The days of externalizing tasks are rapidly coming to a close.
• • Businesses are becoming more development-centered.
• Quality is not easy: The most common mistakes and how to avoid them.
• • Developers don’t need to test their own code; after that everyone is responsible for assuring Quality
  • Agile is truly Team-based, that is why you cannot blame a single part of the Team for Quality problems.
  • The process of continuous improvement involves supporting the QA Team.
  • When Quality hasn’t been measured appropriately, the only measure is the number of bugs and defects. A Development Team has to have clear and measurable KPAs to help Teams improve every single Sprint.
  • Test Automation is not part of the Development goals.
• Reactive Programming:
• • Reactive programming is making sure that things are being taken care of at the moment of development.
  • Messaging is important, things have to be logged appropriately.
  • More mature development Teams around the world are starting to employ subsets of reacting programming to make sure they are enhancing value at the development stage.
• Quality Management.
• • Quality is not the manual tester’s responsibility only, total quality involves everyone’s hands on it.
  • Quality management not only saves costs but also captures opportunities for incremental improvement.

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