Prerequisites for Teams Without Testers

For the past three years I am working in development teams that don’t employ a professional tester. Even though there are skills I miss working without testers, still these teams manage to deliver software in good quality. Nudged by a Twitter conversation, I started thinking what were the things that needed to be in place […]

Skills I Miss Working Without Testers

For the past two years I am the Product Owner in teams that don’t have a dedicated tester. Within the team, we discuss in depth the implications of anything new we plan to develop and test before releasing a feature. Everyone has the best interest of our end users in mind and we all strive […]

Decoupling Deployments from Releases: in Other People’s Words

One of the discussions I keep on having is how practices like Continuous Delivery can jeopardise quality, not allowing enough time for “proper testing”. If every code change can be deployed to production how can we possibly know if the end user experience will remain good? A technique for maintaining a certain level of quality […]

Balancing the Quality Scale

Huib Schoots and Joost Voskuil, had the idea to bring together people with an interest in Quality and ask them questions like “How can you sell Quality?” and “What limitations or barriers do you hit?”. On January 30th, 2021 the first (of many?) Quality Acceleration Peer Conference took place and I was lucky enough to […]

How does Quality fit in CALMS?

Recently, I was asked to give a 15 minute introduction on Quality Strategy in DevOps for our upcoming “Efficient DevOps with SAP” course and I happily accepted. And then, to my horror of horrors, I realised that I needed to figure out what a Quality Strategy is and what makes it unique in a DevOps […]

DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 – Notes on Compliance

Last month, I was lucky enough to attend the London edition of the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020. Like most events this year, I got to watch the presentations from the comfort of my living room even though I was planning to go to London for it. The reason this conference is particularly interesting to me […]

Shifting my Quality Perspective: From a Quality to a Product Owner Role

Not having the word “quality” in my job description is something new for me. I went from “Quality Engineer”, to “Quality Product Accountable”, to “Quality Coach”, always being directly involved in the quality of the product or the process. Now as a product owner I am trying to figure out what is my role in […]

A Pocket Guide to Beta Testing – Part 3

After a small break, I continue with the final part of my Beta testing findings, from some research I did a couple of years back. This one is about how to guide your users through the Beta testing phase and how to ramp up the activities at the end.

A Pocket Guide to Beta Testing – Part 2

A couple of weeks back I posted a blog on how to set up a Beta testing phase, based on resources I found online a couple of years back. In this post I continue with the second stage of Beta testing, Onboarding the Testers, focusing on giving the right amount of information to the testers […]

A Pocket Guide to Beta Testing – Part 1

A couple of years back, a team I was coaching wanted to organise a Beta testing phase for their newly developed product. Since I personally never set-up such an activity, I created a guide for them based on material I found online plus company specific information. Now, as a product owner, I want to try […]

Keeping Up with Compliance in a DevOps World

This post first appeared at the DevTestOps community on October 4, 2019. About 5 years ago I was working in a small product that was doing (almost) everything the DevOps way. We had the works: code and tests versioned in git, trunk based development, building the code once (more or less), feature toggles, daily deployments, […]

X Things I’ve Learned about Contract Testing with Pact

A couple of weeks ago, while at TestBash Manchester, I attended the “Contract Testing in Practice with Pact” workshop led by Pierre Vincent. I had some knowledge of the topic but the workshop helped me get some concepts straight, that either I was not familiar with or I had all wrong. Here are some of the […]

Quality Indicators

One of the questions I get very often as a quality coach is “how can we measure quality?” If I were to reply right off the bat, my answer would be “No clue!” as I find it very hard to quantify something as abstract and ever changing as quality. Nevertheless I think the premise of […]

Of Quality, Testing and Other Demons

Being hired as a software tester implied that I needed to have a strong connection to product quality. And indeed the word Quality appeared everywhere. It was in my job description, Quality Engineer, I was taking care of the Quality Assurance, I would provide proof of the quality of our product to pass the company’s […]

A Collection of Suggestions I Strenuously Resisted

As soon as I started working as a tester, I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my professional life. Being completely inexperienced in software development, my idea of testing was that its purpose was to find bugs. Oh and I loved finding bugs. Starting from gaps in the […]