Robin Van is a Quality Specialist at OTTO. His focus is orchestrating quality assurance in an agile environment with a large number of development teams. He also works on what makes quality assurance in app development different.
In his view, the software testing of the future needs quality coaches. The quality coach is the role that anchors quality as a team value across many agile teams: the coach supports and guides the teams, and each team takes on the quality assurance work together.
What Challenges Will Software Testing Face in the Future?
An ever faster working environment with practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery requires a high degree of automation in quality assurance. Software testing keeps turning into a more complex and more technical field. An app-first approach adds more complexity on top, such as the variety of devices and everything that comes with using a software product on the go. To meet these challenges, the understanding of quality across the company and within the development teams should be brought to a common level.
What Ideas or Solutions Could Address These Challenges?
For quality assurance to become part of the development process as early as possible, competent quality managers should create a shared understanding of quality across their entire area of influence and make it visible. With the high number of releases that come with continuous delivery, software quality has to be a team value that everyone embraces equally. That takes quality managers with strong communication skills who fly the flag for quality standards, for example through coaching and constant conversation, and who push the topic forward.
What Will Future Testing Look Like?
Testing still happens in every phase of software development, so weaknesses surface as early as possible. A quality manager takes on the role of quality coach to anchor software quality as a team value. In the end, the whole team is responsible for software quality and shares the quality assurance tasks. Given the complexity of an app-first strategy combined with continuous delivery, modern approaches such as crowdtesting are worth considering. Testing software will be just one part of the demanding discipline of quality management.
How Can Testers and Test Managers Prepare Today?
It remains vital that testers and test managers keep learning and don’t get comfortable in their daily routine. All testers should also be aware that testing is not only about the software itself. It also covers user stories and processes, which need to be questioned and improved. Moving away from simple tasks that can be automated and toward more complex problems is becoming more and more important. The future does not belong to testers but to quality managers, and it pays to be ready for that.
