Maturing Your QA Practice in a Rapidly Evolving Development Landscape
You are in charge of Quality Assurance at an Organization. Maybe it is new to you, to the organization, or what was previously there just wasn’t working and needed a revamp. Many of us are challenged to build or mature QA in a rapidly and ever-changing software development landscape. Join me for a case study in building QA from *almost* the ground up including challenges and maturity along the way. We will cover how to define capabilities and offerings for your team that are agonistic to the software development methodology and is tool agnostic. We will discuss how to chart your QA team maturity, how to get buy in from business and developers, and the importance of the testing pyramid. Let’s go “all in” on building and maturing your QA practice using creativity, tools, skills, and drive. To sum up my experience in this field: “You’ve got what it takes, but it’ll take everything you’ve got.”
Jamie Sullivan is a Supervisor or Quality Assurance at Modern Woodmen of America – a Fraternal Financial organization - headquartered in the Midwest (Rock Island, Il). In 2016 She was challenged with restarting and building a Quality Assurance practice that was less than 2 years old by learning and developing on the job. With 9 years of prior experience at the organization in everything from Customer service, to Cobol development, to Business Analysis, Project team management, and Leadership. She had the domain knowledge of the software and the business landscape to make it successful. Learning QA and software testing, however, was a unique challenge. Over the past 5 years, Jamie built a QA practice from 3 employees to 11 employees, put automated testing in place, and found her voice in both building and maturing Quality Assurance.