Just like all other conferences this year, DevConf.US was organized virtually too giving everyone an opportunity to share and connect with the open source community. The conference dates were Sep 24-25, 2020.
You can know more about the conference here.
This time, I had a chance to be a part of a panel discussion titled “Is quality a fault line in software development?” along with my team mates Deepak Koul and Shreya Bansal. It was a great opportunity and I truly enjoyed it.
A brief about our session:
Quality is a perceptual, conditional, and somewhat subjective attribute and may be understood differently by different people.
When we talk about software quality, the perception of quality is different for everyone involved in the software development process, what the product management thinks, what quality engineers think, what the customers think and what developers think. Quality has a different meaning to each one and that’s where it becomes a fault line in software development.
A fault line is nothing but a divisive issue or difference of opinion that is likely to have consequences. As an example, religion is a fault line in many countries. In the context of software development, the consequences could be a delay in release cycle or an extra cost to the company.
Below are a few burning questions that we covered (thanks to @koultronix for coming up with these great set of questions):
- What happens when a tester’s vision of quality is different from product management?
- What context are we talking about? Functional, Domain, or Business?
- What steps do you take to continuously build/rebuild that context?
- What is the context-driven testing school of thought?
- What is software quality after all- Internal vs Perceived?
- Is the price paid for that ‘additional effort’ to increase quality worth it?
Our session was scheduled at 13:40 EDT (Sep 25) which is 11:10 pm IST, pretty late on a Friday night but it was a good experience being part of a panel discussion and answering some off beat questions. All sessions were recorded and we should be able to see the recording sometime soon on their YouTube channel.
Adding an update here as on Oct 9, 2020: The recorded session is here.
Thank you for taking the time to read, any feedback or comments appreciated. 🙂
Anisha Narang 