Quality Engineering Role in Root Cause Analysis

The worst defects are the ones that become incidents in production. You might hear about the cost of defects in various stages of the SDLC, but I’ve seen incidents that cost over $1M an hour in production downtime. Some QE teams might avoid looking at these because the fire is too hot. If you are… Continue reading Quality Engineering Role in Root Cause Analysis

Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse

As part of a workshop discussion someone posed the following example to our group of test professionals and asked how we would solve the following problems. I am paraphrasing. How do we insure data quality and integrity at the application programming interface (API) level in the new data warehouse? Note that the solution below is… Continue reading Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse

A Tale of Two Sites…

As a software quality assurance professional with over 15 years’ experience in the field, I was initially shocked by the technical problems with healthcare.gov.  I’ve devoted a large portion of my professional career towards ensuring that things like this never happen to my customers!  However, after much thought, I realized that the ramifications of bad… Continue reading A Tale of Two Sites…

Repeatable and Trustworthy

These are key tenets of any enterprise testing organization but too often the testing teams are at the mercy of the hardware, operating system and middleware configuration of their system under test environments. How can the testing professionals really do their job without a clean and well controlled laboratory? They are mixing chemicals in dirty… Continue reading Repeatable and Trustworthy