I'm trying to research what happens to the QA Engineer role in software companies that use Continuous Deployment. What does the QA role morph into, and what skills would the QA Engineer need to develop in order to survive there?
In business, there is always an urge to do more with less. Save money. Reduce headcount. Increase the bottom line. Improve quality. Trim bloated processes... And as with all businesses, so goes the software business. The problem is that here in Boston I worry that the "bloated process" is interpreted as the role of QA Engineer...
Back in March 2017 at a Ministry of Testing - Boston Meetup, I bumped into Andreas Grabner from Dynatrace, who mentioned something regarding Continuous Deployment that as a QA Engineer for twenty years sent shivers up my spine...
1) Andreas' company, Dynatrace... it didn't have a QA Department. According to him, they didn't need one. It took a lot of time and effort, but they engineered it that way. The QA Engineers had been given thorough training in development, focusing the quality of their unit and integration tests. Now, as he put it, if something fails, it is the individual contributor's job to to catch it. If they don't catch it, there is no QA buffer, they hear about it directly from the customer ... Talk about getting fast feedback!
2) They don't just use Continuous Integration, where a release engineer guided deployments to Production. Dynatrace used the next stage: Continuous Deployment. All code, after passing a battery of carefully written automatically run unit and integration tests, is pushed directly into Production.
For more information about this process Dynatrace went through, Andreas sent this to me https://www.devopsdays.org/events/2017-toronto/program/andreas-grabner/
To me, unit tests, integration tests, and 100% code coverage couldn't possibly be enough. Here's why:
Although the quality of the software product is everyone's job, to me, the QA Engineer embedded in an Agile team is the shepherd of the the quality assurance process, an end-user advocate whose job description is explicitly tied to creating a mental model of the customer through examining use cases, each and every feature requirement, and making sure each acceptance criteria is there in the product.
To me, there is no way for a developer to churn out high-quality peer-reviewed code with close to 100% code coverage involving the unit and integration tests, and to also test all the different ways the customer will interact with the product through the many different web and mobile interfaces.
Here's the thing: I may know how they used to do QA before Continuous Deployment. I don't know how companies are doing it now, especially since I have only been an automation developer only for the past two years. So, I am not certain what to tell members of the Ministry of Testing, Boston chapter, where I am an Organizer, members who are looking to survive the pressures of the current local job market.
My Questions to You
- Do you think 100% code coverage of unit tests and integration tests is enough in environments using Continuous Deployment? What do you use as supplements in your testing efforts?
- How has the QA Engineer role survived as you push to Continuous Deployment? Has it?
- How has the QA role changed and morphed as you go from CI (Continuous Integration, with a Release Engineer) to CD (Look, ma, I am pushing to production)?
- Does your company still employ traditional manual testers in environments with Continuous Deployment is used?
Please let me know! And let me know if you mind being quoted for the article.
Thank you so much!
Happy Testing!
-T.J. Maher
Twitter | LinkedIn | GitHub
// Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test, Software Tester since 1996.
// Contributing Writer for TechBeacon.
// "Looking to move away from manual QA? Follow Adventures in Automation on Facebook!"
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