Quality Assurance alone would not suffice to match the speed, persistence, and thoroughness that the Agile development and Shift-Left world demands today. Quality Engineering ensures that quality is not an after-thought.

1. Evolving from
Quality
Assurance
to Quality
Engineering
The Big Burst –
Choices, Challenges, and Complexities
Why QA needs an intervention?
We are in a time where devices are proliferating at a never-before speed, where 97 percent of respondents (in
the report) show some kind of IoT presence in their products and where Cloud, DevOps, and Agile have ceased
to be mere powerpoint enhancers. They are now stark realities that software and application teams encounter
and leverage every day. No wonder, there is a pressing need to bring Software Development/Design Engineer in
Test (SDETs) into the team; and to inject skills in security, nonfunctional testing, test environments, and data
management among testers. The challenges and context of this modern software/applications world have
created a seismic shake. It is a post-Uber planet where only the best will survive. And relying on QA alone is not
going to make the cut here.
Quality Assurance (QA) only entails activities for ensuring quality, spotting flaws early enough, code review,
analysis, and refactoring. But the users need a stronger and broader variant of this approach. One that goes
beyond testing cycles, one that percolates into the culture and the very way developers and designers think
about software. Yes, get set for the arrival of Quality Engineering (QE).
Quality Engineering transcends quality control, quality assurance, and testing. It is proactive, strategic,
forward-looking, intuitive and is way bigger in scope than QA. It is not limited to processes and procedures. It
expands into the realm of the way these processes come up – right at the nucleus of ideation and
user-empathy. It straddles across all areas of QA and testing and lifts quality to an altogether new level.
You will notice that QA is inclined towards some earlier stages of the software development, and had a
postcode-writing role wherein QA teams checked what developers had written. But QE is not the fag end of a
software cycle. It is a radical way that starts way ahead of where code begins. It permeates the entire
development flow. QE helps organizations and developer-tester teams to come together against the onslaught
of the diversity as well as the exponential rise of too many devices, platforms, applications, and content needs.
QA alone would not suffice to match the speed, persistence, and thoroughness that the Agile development and
Shift-Left world demands today. Quality Engineering ensures that quality is embraced early on and is enhanced
at every step and desk – and not just at the exit door doormat of software code. It undertakes end-to-end and
architectural approaches for comprehensive software quality.
But – How to evolve from QA to QE?
Organizations have to embrace this new culture and mindset to embark on this massive shift.
This is where a continuous integration model between developers and testers would come into play. Testing
becomes consistent, embedded into code design and gets easy to integrate into the entire chain. Development
becomes iterative, collaborative and adaptive. It also entails localization of problems and fixing of individual
parts so that all red flags are addressed before the whole software adds up. Organizations will have to usher in
a new way of looking at and designing the software development lifecycle. This has to be fortified with
sustainable automation frameworks and methodologies, as well as Continuous Integration endeavours.
Resources and bandwidth would have to be furnished so that a test infrastructure can flourish and integrate
without any scalability or latency hiccups. Test environments and production environments would also need to
be conjoined in a way that quality becomes a precursor rather than an afterthought. Automation of tests might
be called for. QA folks might be asked to think and code like a user.
This is where the culture and habit parts would face a makeover. Helping and empowering others – beyond
organizational silos, dependencies and software hierarchies – will be the new norm for Quality Engineering to
get into action. Even the delivery aspects would change- get set for a scenario of multiple releases and
entire-system-checks. QE teams are involved and impactful in software design at a new degree and depth; so
that core functionality tests can be planned for with a proactive edge.
In short, the move to QE reflects but is not limited to, the switch-over from waterfall era to Shift-Left era of
software. With QE in place, quality travels right up to the north-most point of any software.
QE is about thinking of quality all the time, at every level and by everyone around.
QE – More than a Vowel Change
Businesses in the current era of impatient customers cannot afford to have even a small disruption in their
business-uptime. That gives a different gravity to quality. That is where QE shines. And a QE professional is
much more than a coder or a tester.
Project managers and CTOs are gearing up to tap this new face and fuel of quality. It’s time for a new
regimen – one that does more than simply measure.
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