Practical Quality Engineering

About the course

Quality engineering incorporates many well-proven approaches that aim to build in quality from the start of the SDLC, rather than attempting to test it in at the end. The goal is to help the team deliver the right quality, quicker and cheaper by reducing waste, therefore saving rework, stress and frustration. The adoption of quality engineering practices is recommended for teams trying to increase the performance of their IT delivery - whether it is through DevOps, Agile or 'enlightened waterfall', to help ensure that their business remains highly competitive in this fast-changing and unpredictable world that we live in.

Testing is a fundamental part of quality engineering, but the primary purpose of testing is to measure whether the team is delivering the business value that it set out to deliver. Testing is not done to ensure quality, but to give feedback to the team about whether quality is actually there. In quality engineering, testing is applied early and continuously to provide the team with fast, ongoing feedback, allowing any mistakes to be corrected quickly and cost-effectively.

Poor quality is the result of mistakes being made. Mistakes can be made at any point, from the moment the product or feature is imagined right up until its delivery to users and customers. Therefore, the two other key pillars of quality engineering are identifying places where mistakes are more likely to happen and using various techniques to prevent them and learning from both successes and failures to try to improve the process, people and tools involved in developing the product. 

This training course has a practical approach. Sessions start with a theoretical introduction but are followed by practical sessions where the ideas we introduced are applied. Attendees will get to share their knowledge and experience with each other.

In-house training

For the in-house format, where the course is run for one or more teams, the teams will apply the concepts of quality engineering on their own day-to-day work, leaving the course with a set of improvement topics they will commit to implement. Therefore, the course will deliver tangible benefits to your organization.

Topics covered in the course

• From testing in quality to quality engineering: An introduction to quality engineering.
  
  
• IT Delivery Models. From waterfall to DevOps: Why DevOps has become the basis of truly high-performance teams who deliver exceptional business value. How the quality engineering principles built into DevOps can be applied in any type of SDLC.
  
  
• Quality and quality risks: Focussing on what quality means in terms of business value and our stakeholders.
  
  
• Building quality in: The difference between a test-in quality and built-in quality approach.
  
  
• Shift-left: Early detection and correction of mistakes.
  
  
• Preventing quality issues: We look at why mistakes are made and when there are higher risks of mistakes. Then look at techniques to prevent them from happening.
  
  
• Teaming: We explain why cross-functional teams and collaboration are the powerhouse of quality engineering.
  
  
• Continuous improvement and flow. How we can identify where we have bottlenecks and decide what we can do about them.

Trainers