Panoramic Quality – The Fellowship of Testing in DevOps


DevOps drastically changes the landscape of testing. Collaboration between operations and development teams enables a stream of small changes to be deployed to production. This pace of change puts a strain on traditional testing activities. There used to be a sense of safety in dedicating hours or days to testing after code is complete and before release, yet this is a luxury and liability in DevOps. The more time that elapses from when code is written to when it is deployed, the more risk is introduced. The geography of production code is in a constant state of change, the longer testing takes the more the landscape around and beneath you changes, and the more risk it accrues.

This rapid rate of change requires testers to broaden their vision, and shift the focus and geography of their actions. In this talk testers will see that while they may have lost full ownership the testing tasks they are accustomed to performing, DevOps has expanded the opportunity for testers to become arbiters of quality.

I’ll share 3 core responsibilities of testers in DevOps: to know, protect, and verify. Using these responsibilities I’ll establish a working definition of Quality Ownership. Then discuss its relationship to Product Ownership to help testers look beyond deriving quality from executing tests and shift instead towards becoming quality owners.

This talk will help testers to find their path to enabling continuous quality, through pairing and sharing test ownership across the team while instilling value from pull request to production.

Session Takeaways:

  • How to go from a bug reporter to a quality owner.
  • What makes testing in DevOps so different, and how to be successful in it.
  • Why where you test, changes how you test.

DevOps Leadership Strategy
Location: Harbour B Date: April 3, 2019 Time: 10:15 am - 11:15 am Brendan Connolly