Quality Engineering Bingo Night
4:15 - 5:15 East Ballroom
Shift left! Testing is everyone's responsibility! Prevent defects instead of detecting them later! Build quality in. An inevitable reference to Deming. Ready to play some Quality Engineering Bingo? In this talk, Caleb will cover common "catch phrases" associated with Quality Engineering, including both some of the strongest arguments in favor of QE concept, and where the logic falls short of justifying the complete elimination of dedicated testers. Many of the ideas of Quality Engineering in software are taken from the discipline of the same name in manufacturing. While there are parallels, it's also easy to gloss over the differences. Manufacturing processes are, by definition, repeatable. Software development, in contrast, is often messier than we care to admit, because it's developed by fallible humans, not robots. So let's shift left and find ways to catch defects earlier or prevent them in the first place. Let's understand what it means for testing to be everyone's responsibility. But let's also get more specific about what that means for each role. Let's also acknowledge that no matter how much we streamline and improve our development processes, nothing in software is infallible. We still need to consider how we might be fooled, or miss something, and how we can improve our efforts to find defects after implementation as well.
Caleb Crandall
Caleb is a Software Engineer in Test and Scrum Master at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. He earned his group's "Certified Biomek Engineer" badge of honor while still an intern (i.e. causing an epic hardware crash) and has been hooked on testing ever since. Caleb has been helping develop and test medical and research devices for over 12 years, and is now focused on improving and streamlining testing efforts at every stage of the design, development, and release process. He enjoys getting his hands dirty running hardware out in the development lab, and still keeps a pile of broken hardware "trophies" on his desk.