What Really Happens When You Deliver Software Quickly
The current trend in testing is to move away from traditional manual testing and toward test automation. To keep up with the rapid pace of continuous delivery today, test teams are urgently reskilling and reshaping themselves. Sally Goble shares her experience of what happened to the test team at the Guardian when the engineering team began the process of delivering software fast and at will—deploying software up to 400 times a day. Sally shares why her team reevaluated the role of testing in the software development cycle, what prompted the Guardian’s controversial decision to abandon conventional test automation, and how they started to step back from manual testing as well. Sally explains what her team does to mitigate the risk of this radical approach. She examines the benefits that teams can realize from these changes and how other organizations can adopt this approach. Sally discusses what the QA team at the Guardian does now that they are not preoccupied with testing—from the tools they build to the processes they have re-imagined—and the benefits that these changes can have on the organization.
Sally Goble is head of quality at the Guardian, the world’s second most read online news platform in the world. For six years she has worked on the digital development team, witnessing many changes in the way online news is delivered to readers. Previously, Sally was a tech consultant in the early days of computer adoption for business use, helping teams come to grips with the new-fangled thing called the Internet, teaching them how to incorporate tech into their companies, and encouraging them to embrace change. She could be spotted lugging an Apple Mac SE30 around London as her then “portable computer.” An avid swimmer, Sally is one of fewer than 500 women to have swum the English Channel. Follow Sally on Twitter.