Continuous Improvement

Abstract:

The past few years have seen a phenomenon of software organizations abandoning traditional release cycles in favor of daily or even hourly deployments. The emergence of a new, rapid software development workflow has raised questions regarding the role of test and QA in a product's life cycle. When there is no QA phase, can there still be QA?

Indeed, as the speed of product development changes, risk must be assessed differently. A monthly release cycle provides time to assure a product is reasonably free of defects. In a rapid release cycle, such assurance is impossible. Quality instead comes to mean assuring that the product is capable of recovering from defects.

I will discuss how software risk mitigation practice changes as the speed of development increases. And I will explore the idea that recovering from failure is a far more pragmatic goal than preventing failure in the first place."

Speaker: Noah Sussman, Test Architect at Etsy