Anyone who knows Rik Marselis knows that we are dealing with a real savvy in the field of software testing. During the recent customer afternoon of Testersuite , he took the Testersuite fans on a presentation about 'Quality for DevOps teams'.
In his talk, Rik leads us past the challenges of 'high-perfomance IT delivery' and 'focus on business value'. Two trendy terms that immediately raise the question of what they mean. Rik explains: "Developing software and systems qualitatively is about taking responsibility as a team for quality. It has to be a mindset."
You may see this as an open door, but the question is whether it is really an open door. Take as a metaphor a customer service department within an organisation. Shouldn't customer service be a mindset instead of a department? Rik continues: "Quality should be built into the product, the process and the people. That also means that testing is part of it rather than an activity at the end of the process."
The attentive audience is taken through measures and activities that deliver and secure quality. Rik tells the audience that they must start working with cross-functionalitywithin DevOps teams. This means that the team has all the competencies and skills needed to carry out the necessary tasks. So no team member has a monopoly on performing a task, each team member has multiple skills and abilities. This way, the team can always move forward, even if a team member is temporarily unavailable. A person can have several roles in a row or even in parallel. It is not common for people to have a specific role, as that would easily lead to monopolies on certain tasks.
The question that Rik's story raises for us is whether DevOps teams should have all disciplines in house? Rik's answer is clear: "No, that would be going very far. A team can of course collaborate with specialists from other teams or support groups for specific tasks."
The participants of the Testersuite customer afternoon are shown intriguing examples of different test forms, test types, test automation and exploratory testing. Again and again, Rik manages to make the translation to quality assurance by DevOps teams.
For those who want to delve deeper into this matter, the book Quality for DevOps teams is available. Rik Marselis is one of the authors of this book. Would you like to know more about the book or about the above subject matter? Then please contact us via info@testersuite.nl.
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