Speaker

Aida Manna Loyarte

Aida Manna Loyarte

Software Developer at Thoughtworks

Barcelona, Spain

Aida began her career as a QA 13 years ago, starting with manual testing and later moving on to automated testing. She believes that in order to have a good quality approach, QAs need to be involved in the development of the application. For this reason, as a QA, she always worked very closely with developers: getting involved in the development, performing lower-level testing, and helping to improve CI/CD processes. Three years ago, Aida decided to take on a new challenge and become a developer, but she has always maintained a close focus on quality and testing.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Software testing
  • Software Development

Is having a QA a symptom of a dysfunctional team?

I've observed that many teams begin with just developers and an extremely tight deadline. When this occurs, the team is under pressure to deliver and quality is not always a priority, resulting in it being sacrificed with the promise of addressing it later. This can become a problem, causing the team's delivery to slow down and new features to require more development work. At this point, teams start thinking about how they can improve the quality of their project and often resort to hiring a QA person for this endeavor. However, without the proper team structure and support, this can be a very difficult task for the new team member.

Many times, the QA role is only introduced in teams when things have already gone wrong, so I began to question whether it is a symptom of a dysfunctional team.

During this talk, I want to share my journey as a QA. I began as a manual QA, then moved on to automation, led a QA department, returned to automation, and ultimately transitioned to software development. Throughout this journey, my role has changed significantly. I would like to share tips and tricks that helped me build quality as a practice within the team, rather than making it the sole responsibility of the QA person.

UI tests are dead, long live UI tests!

Is it really worth automating UI tests? In most of the cases, the cost of maintenance is much higher than the benefit they bring. However, it can still provide a lot of value, if kept to a minimum. In this talk I’ll explain what other kind of tests or techniques can be implemented to avoid doing that much UI testing. We will revisit the testing pyramid and explore how it can be adapted to the context we now find in projects.

Aida Manna Loyarte

Software Developer at Thoughtworks

Barcelona, Spain