Quality engineering is a fun, nebulous concept. I’m into it because of that, not through any deep belief, just the freedom it affords. You can be a great exploratory tester and still be a quality engineer, as long as you have the skills to choose where to focus that skill and energy. I’m not scared of definitions with a bit of wiggle room either. The tighter you try and define something, the more of it slips through your fingers Governor Tarkin. Definitions miss the really good stuff, like the hidden loops that exist within quality engineering.
My favourite hidden loop is making speculative suggestions. This is the way it usually goes.
- Ash thinks of a quality related activity, which is appropriate in the current context and will address a risk we have
- Ash suggests said quality related activity, everyone says maybe and goes away and thinks about it. Maybe they think we don’t need it (yet or ever), need more time to ponder, or have other things on their mind.
- Sometime later, some else on the team suggests said activity and adoption (or at least an experiment) follows.
This might be part of the strategy or not, might be something truly valuable that has emerged. Quality engineering is emergent by the way not to be set wholly and immutably at the beginning and at organisational level.
I can always tell those who talk about quality and testing but haven’t dipped their toes in reality for a while, as they don’t recognise the hidden loop.
Let me give you a recent example, for a system in its early days:
- Ash suggests building a web-hook to post messages onto a queue. We can use this for exploratory testing, performance testing, essentially it democratises putting messages on queues for the whole team. Everyone with Postman and a little knowledge or training could use it.
- The team says why would we need that, it’s too early and other reasons. Ash says fine, just think about it.
- Fast forward a couple of months, the team says we need a way to enable performance testing and democratise the ability to post messages to the queue. Ash says that’s a great idea, let’s do it.
There is nothing in the quality engineering strategy that talks about this, why would there be? Its local to the team and its context. That one web-hook would be more valuable that any part of the strategy though.
Once you recognise the loops that hide in the spaces your strategy doesn’t reach, you’ll be a better quality engineer for it.
Diagram Industries 