Reading interview notes, from interviewing others not long ago, I came across a great question from a candidate applying for a quality engineering role at my old company. This lovely person asked “what exactly do you do?”.

I love this question.

"In my capacity as a Staff Quality Engineer and Quality coach I create and promote a quality mindset within the engineering team and the business. I work with stakeholders to discover or determine quality goals, explore the product to gain context, but also establish and support Observability to get the right data and better context of what is happening with our Products Health. Looking at what happens after a story/feature has been shipped, “shifting right” as well as “shifting left”. It’s about collaboration and exploration."

Well that’s the elevator pitch over 😛

Thanks for your support Paul Mescal, it is as always...appreciated.

What I didn’t mention is that testing is at the heart of everything I do. I am also a testing advocate. So as you can guess my testing and quality mindset can be beneficial at anytime in the SDLC. I am curious. Curious and then curious some more. I ask questions all the time. Even if it is just internally. Even if it annoys the f*ck out of people - I have Curiosity aligned with purpose (knowing oneself within the context they work).

You see it all starts with an idea.

Quality engineers, software engineers, testers, we collaborate around the ideas and data to form requirement artefacts. We collaborate to think about requirement and product risks. We use these artefacts to stem architecture design, platform design, code design etc. To break up the work, slice it based on event mapping and risk storming. We write the code. We have operational and non operational software that we can assess. We deploy the software to production. We keep observing, supporting and maintaining that software in production and then we do it all over again for the next feature ideas or iteration on that product. This is a simplistic view of what we do but it works.

We talk about shifting left because we want to prevent bugs not break things. So we get curious before you get furious (we've all seen the tester vs developer memes). We pause before judging and taking offence when people don’t understand the points we raise, we stay engaged with the people and the world we need to influence. Why amp up your anger when you can work your wonder, as I always say to my imaginary mate Paul.

Thanks for reading.

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