This is the first part of a four-part blog post series describing how we in Base have built a modern test automation and cloud testing solution. The first part is a high-level overview of a problem that we have faced and a solution to it. The second part is going to be a deep dive…
Heart of engineering
Treating quality as an entire experience requires a major change in how to approach both the team organization and development process. For us this means putting QA’s at the center of each team, giving them the influence necessary to shape whole experiences and making them an integral part of the development process very early on.
GATEKEEPING QUALITY
QA’s work side by side with developers and say “push to production” only if every detail of the product is near perfection and they can vouch for it with pride. Being involved early on in the development process also lets them shape specifications, helping product owners nail down the scope and flow of every experience.
GATEKEEPING QUALITY
QA’s work side by side with developers and say “push to production” only if every detail of the product is near perfection and they can vouch for it with pride. Being involved early on in the development process also lets them shape specifications, helping product owners nail down the scope and flow of every experience.
HELPING SHAPE DESIGN
Catching UX inconsistencies even before the coding begins saves a lot of time and effort. These gains are why QA’s are most welcome to take part already in the design process.
HELPING SHAPE DESIGN
Catching UX inconsistencies even before the coding begins saves a lot of time and effort. These gains are why QA’s are most welcome to take part already in the design process.
Quality is not about finding bugs
When your product is someone’s primary work tool and is being used for many hours every single workday even a single popup or an unnecessary option turns out to be a significant waste of time and energy. Building experiences that define the way thousands of people work requires us to get into customers’ shoes, to think deeply about how easy and intuitive the experience is to the user – both newcomer and superuser – to truly understand the problems they encounter in their daily work.
This involved approach helps us build experiences that people fall in love with. Experiences that bring up reactions like these:
automation is the backbone of great quality
It helps focus on the things that really matter – solving new challenges instead of wasting time on repetitive testing activities. Thus applying automation wherever it makes sense and having the freedom to pick or create testing tools brings huge leverage to what we do.
The power of WebDriver allowed us to utilise the same syntax for web and mobile tests through a single Page-Object Pattern implementation.
Scaling tests has become super easy thanks to having our infrastructure on Amazon EC2 capable of scaling on demand with auto-provisioned Jenkins nodes.
We care about users’ data a lot, so we check its consistency by deep end-to-end tests. We call it data quality testing and it is a part of our automation suite.
You can improve only what you can measure
To truly understand the quality of the product and be able to continuously improve it, it needs to be measured in a structured way. Based on automatically gathered quality signals we measure a Quality Score for each part of the application.
This shows us the big picture and acts as a compass for development teams, helping them focus on the parts of the product that require immediate improvement.
You can improve only what you can measure
To truly understand the quality of the product and be able to continuously improve it, it needs to be measured in a structured way. Based on automatically gathered quality signals we measure a Quality Score for each part of the application.
This shows us the big picture and acts as a compass for development teams, helping them focus on the parts of the product that require immediate improvement.
Recent blog posts about quality
The ‘what’ of writing tests
In the previous post (The ‘why’ of writing tests) of this series I talked about my motivation behind creating automated tests and how I learned to appreciate them as a productivity tool. That explained why I write them. Today I want to share what I cover with tests. Let’s Recap Let me briefly summarize the…
The ‘why’ of writing tests
Today, I’m going to tell you about my quest to discover tests. I think that many people walk the same path I walked, struggling with the same obstacles and debating over similar problems. There is value in that. We all learn best from our own mistakes, and when lost, you often find interesting places. I’m…