Alisha Foster

➝ Quality First Mindset: Features are not released under any circumstance unless quality expectations are met.

➝ Quality Advocacy: Quality is not viewed as the Quality Organization's job. It is regarded as the entire company's job. Everyone needs to be trained to have a quality mindset, not just quality engineers. This also means everyone is a quality advocate, not just the quality engineers on the team.

➝ Quality Inclusion: Quality should be included in most conversations in which engineers would be had. This includes, but is not limited to, the design, implementation, testing, and maintenance phases of the SDLC. This gives space to the teams to think about quality early and often in the development process and allows quality to partner early on with product managers and think through challenges the customer may face or gaps product managers may have overlooked.

➝ Customer Advocacy: Advocating for quality means advocating for our customers. We should all consider features with the customer in mind, not just what we believe the customers want, but what we know the customers want.

➝ Beta Testing: Our product should be so reliable that our customer base wants to be part of beta testing. They are eager to get their hands on new features and help us test real-world scenarios by being part of our beta testing phase and giving us feedback.

➝ Escaped Defects: Top-level severity defects are a thing of the past. We are so well covered and have trained everyone so well that top-severity defects no longer slip by us. We have expectations set for the defect limits that we strive for, and we can easily hit those expectations - something like no more than one bug per team per month.

➝ Automation: Our primary release regression is fully automated. Quality engineers are no longer manually testing during releases aside from exploratory testing. We have CI/CD working with us, and we run our focused automated suite on each PR merge. Our quality engineers can balance creating automation and manual testing without hindering the team's velocity.

➝ Culture: Quality engineers are happy to work at the company. They're excited about their teams and projects and find work enjoyable. The entire company supports a total quality mindset, and the environment is blameless when defects happen - it's a whole process failure, not a quality engineering failure. We still make mistakes, but mistakes are accepted and used as learning opportunities, not focused on as failure points.

➝ Teamwork and Collaboration: We operate with the whole company in mind. We learn quality from everyone, no matter the team they're on. We collaborate when encountering something new and utilize everyone's brainpower to determine the best solutions and testing approaches.

➝ Continuous Learning: We never stop learning. The quality space constantly changes with new tools, testing approaches, and methodologies. We are all dedicated to keeping up with the quality space, learning all we can about the next best tactic, and even brainstorming and trying new tactics ourselves.

➝ Metrics: We know what to track and how to track it to prove the quality of our product. Reliability, performance, meeting our customer's needs, reduced defects, reduced time to release, etc.