Track Talk

Engaging with Data, and your Customers, to Radically Improve Your Quality

Erik Fogg

15:00-15:30 CEST Thursday 30th September

Everyone knows automated end-to-end (E2E) test maintenance is a grind. Silicon Valley has produced dozens of Machine Learning-supported record and play tools to make test maintenance a little bit easier. But the big elephant (still) in the room is that test case management is still an archaic operation involving blindfolds and dart boards. Quality leaders are left to figure out what test cases really matter using little more than rule-of-thumb heuristics, dressed up in fancy clothes.

We lean on big E2E test suites because we don’t have the data to prioritise what E2E tests should be run often, sometimes, or never. These big tests suites must go the way of the Dodo–they are holding us back from achieving efficient Continuous Delivery and deployment.

The good news is that data to help us prioritise does exist–our customers are constantly telling us what features matter to them, and how they want to use them! Product Management teams use this product analytics data constantly to inform their own activity–QA should do the same. By engaging data and engaging our customers in our test case management operations, we can dramatically reduce test runtimes and simultaneously improve product quality. In doing so, we enable true CD.