Real Life Stories from Real Life Quality Assurance Professionals

There are not many professions as diverse as Quality Assurance. From the range of platforms and products under test through to the tools that are used and the environments that the systems are deployed into; there are a myriad of variables and variances that all combine to make for an interesting yet sometimes frustrating career choice. As we close out the year, we have appreciated the willingness of the community themselves to share the experiences that they themselves have had. Our Manawatu Software Quality Assurance community is a great example of this.

Hosted by the great team at FMG, for our meetup event on 22^nd October, we had the privilege of two good speakers from our hosting organisation, both with topics informed by their own recent work:

• First up, Ben walked through his work within FMG on their own migration from Selenium Test Automation to Playwright. Achieved within 3 months and a net reduction in test execution time from 2 days to 16 minutes, Ben talked the attendees through the rationale, approach, outcomes and lessons learned of the migration. From scary starts to the scoping approach, Ben’s talk covered the non-technical parts of the migration – triaging the tests to migrate, a focus on unit tests over the UI in typical testing pyramid fashion and the need to improve maintainability – all without adding quality risk and quality debt to FMG. Given the increasing popularity of Playwright in the community, Ben’s presentation generated a lot of questions and provided good guidance to those considering their own migration – noting again their own organisational differences. Ben’s presentation can be seen here.
• Following Ben, Kieran walked through the approach taken by FMG for the testing of a significant and complex core system upgrade. To give some insight into the way in which the Quality Assurance was approached, Keiran took the position of presenting the Quality Assurance approach in the same way that it would be presented to the Programme Steering Committee, inclusive of walking through the team structure and personnel. Given the presentation approach, Kieran’s talk was informative in covering the programme complexity – particularly at an integration level, the types of testing used, when the types of testing were scheduled and the tooling that was used. For commercial reasons, Kieran’s presentation (available here) is heavily redacted. Those at the session however were treated to a real-life overview of how to structure the testing approach for complex large system implementations and had a great QnA session afterwards. 

Having organised and facilitated these events for over six years now, I’m always humbled by the willingness of people to contribute to the community, and impressed by the types of work that the community is covering. Combined, these two presentations at this event reinforced this. While the industry is currently dominated by talk of AI and tooling, we sometimes risk losing sight of the value of the individual in making sure that Quality Assurance is delivered and delivered well. Ben and Kieran surfaced this well – thank you.