Leading a Journey to Better Quality

What is the focus of your work these days?

I work as Head of Quality at Thought Machine, and my focus has been one to enable teams to bake quality in the entire process, but not only engineering, it's also focused on how we work with clients, how we create processes, are we creating the right processes and so on. I work on measuring a lot of metrics as part of this. That's what I like to do day to day. Sometimes I also like to get my hands dirty and test tickets with the team.

What is the motivation for your talk?

I've always been asked to come in and fix quality in my role. But where do you start? It's not only about writing test automation. There are a lot of things which bring quality for an organization. I have done a lot of reading around this. I've spoken to a lot of people, some industry leaders around this and gotten ideas and tried to implement that. It sets a really good foundation for how to start. And hopefully in a year's time I'll be able to look back and reflect and share the outcomes, because that's what you want to listen to as a practitioner, which you don't get. I'm not shy of sharing things which didn't work out or things we tried and that didn't work out. And this is how we improved and this is why we improved and this is the motivation for it.

How would you describe the persona and the level of the target audience?

This talk is catered for everybody. Even if you're a junior engineer or you're mid-level or senior or you're principal level or a Scrum master, even if you're a product owner. Quality is about the whole food chain, as I call it in engineering. It starts from how you start writing stories to how you deliver and deploy and the feedback from your customer.

What do you want this persona to walk away from your talk with?

I want them to walk away with some metrics that I will discuss, how you can measure them. What is the value of measuring them, how to present and get buy in from the teams? Because this is something people in my role struggle with. Everybody wants quality. But if you think about the cost, time and quality triangle, quality is the one which gets scrapped quite easily. How do you make sure that you are not the only person talking about this and how can you make a compelling conversation.