Track Talk W2

Defects Don’t Kill You; They Make You Stronger.

Rawad Mansour

11:00-11:45 CEST Wednesday 8th June

Our goal is to prevent defects, right? We work hard to achieve this, and we do, sometimes. But we all know, it’s not always rainbows and butterflies. Those annoying defects keep on showing and even more when we least expect it.  How are we, as QA, acting when they come knocking at our door? Are we properly dealing with them while working in fast agile cycles? Are we learning from our mistakes and enhancing our processes?

“There are two sides of the same coin”. Defects that are caught in production can be costly to fix BUT they are the client’s most concrete feedback on quality. We’ve decided to accept the challenge and benefit from this feedback to shape our testing.

Through the 30+ years of Murex, we never ignored our clients’ defects, but each module dealt with their part in a decentralized way. However, working in a company of 2300+ employees and 300+ clients, our challenge was to find a unified method that is more sustainable on a large scale. Our story started back in 2019, the time we decided to quit our old habits and try a different approach. After weeks of analysing defects’ data with developers and Product Managers, we launched a new process to investigate the root cause and take actions on the identified gaps.

Being a QA Operational Manager and a Test Lead, I drove my team towards applying and promoting this process. The action that we started locally with few teams and a dozen of defects, is now widely applied in 52 agile teams involving more than 450 developers and 120 QA Engineers. The deployment wasn’t easy, and we faced lots of challenges and impediments along the journey of it becoming a team mindset. More analysed defects meant a deeper knowledge of our product and thus a better assessment on how to test. Be it automatic, manual, or even nothing, we explored different options and each scenario offered us a new learning experience.

During this presentation, I will take you through the ups and downs of this journey, how we managed to transform this small team initiative into a global objective and how we were able to apply different testing strategies along the way.