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My Imperfect Journey to the Whole Team Owning Quality - Francis Ho

13th January 2023

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Francis Ho

Quality Engineering Lead

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Talk Description

We often hear success stories about shifting QA left; to have the mindset of preventing bugs rather than finding bugs, or that the entire product team is responsible for quality. I’ve always found them inspiring, so when I was given the opportunity to lead and define how we do QA at my company, an expanding startup with a growing engineering team, I set out on the journey to experience for myself this utopia where QA isn’t just about gatekeeping.

Four years later at my company, we no longer perform full manual regression tests before every release but are now deploying to production dozens of times a day without the need for human gatekeepers.

In this talk let me take you through our journey towards that utopia, what happened along the way, and how I battled between the desire for shared ownership of quality and the reassurance from hands-on QA testing before releases that is deeply embedded in me, because that’s just what’s expected of QA folks. A QA that doesn’t do any testing before releases, or sometimes even new features? What am I here for then?

This is a real story of how it unfolded. It is not a perfect journey, but it is ours.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:

Hear about a real story of how QA stopped being the gatekeepers
How to let go of doing what we have been taught our entire careers
Learn about ways of working to enable frequent releases while still having a quality product
Inspire you at least a little to take small steps towards a bigger goal

Francis Ho

Quality Engineering Lead

Francis Ho is the Quality Engineering Lead at Auror, a startup that helps prevent retail crime, reduce loss and making stores safer. They work with some of the largest retailer in the regions, e.g. Walmart, Coles, Woolworths. Francis has previously worked in companies of varying size and many sectors, from Healthcare to Fintech to Big data and now Retail Crime. He is passionate about creating a work environment that allows people to do their best work, and he loves building software that brings a positive impact to the society. He joined his current company in hopes of finding a different way of working than what he has previously done. Francis lives in New Zealand, home of the Hobbits. In his spare time, he is busy exploring with his two years old son and listening to baby shark on repeat.