How SDETs & QEs Can Step Up and Empower Their Dev Teams
Test automation and ensuring quality are traditionally the responsibilities that fall under QEs and SDETs – the PO defines & scopes the capability and business value, the developers create the feature, and then SDETs create the test automation and perform comprehensive testing to ensure high quality. Nowadays, this approach has become agile and iterative, but it mostly stayed the same - the SDET or QE usually carries most of the weight when it comes to testing and ensuring quality. It is now time to evolve the role that SDETs and QEs play to become that who empowers the team from beginning to end of development, and not merely participate in test automation and testing at certain parts of the SDLC. In this talk, I will present simple actions QEs and SDETs can make to engage the developers into quality-related activities, testing and writing test automation. Aside from empowering their teams to be quality-focused, this will elevate the role the SDETs & QEs play in the teams.
Mary Ann Belarmino is currently the Sr. Director of Software Quality at Western Digital. Before Western Digital, she was the Director of Quality Services in Pegasystems where she lead multiple quality-focused groups - Quality Excellence group (focused on quality discipline and shift-left best practices, and quality assurance), and Quality Productivity group (focused on building test frameworks, visualization and productivity tools). Prior to this role, Mary Ann was also the Sr. Product Manager for Application Quality in Pegasystems. Before Pegasystems, Mary Ann worked at MathWorks for 14 years where she held multiple roles - product lead, software engineer, quality engineer - in the areas of embedded targets, digital signal processing, and cloud. Mary Ann graduated from the University of the Philippines with a degree in BS in Applied Physics. Her experience also includes being a junior instructor at the University of the Philippines (UP) & University of Asia and the Pacific (UAP), and volunteer teaching for high school students from under-represented communities in the Philippines.