Decision Making in Testing
MAIN TRACK TALK
Data Driven Decisions in Testing
Leveraging the data available to us can give us a whole new perspective on the risks our business and team need to mitigate. Data gives us a different perspective through which to see and understand our systems. It allows us to ask different questions, to see different risks, to uncover the unexpected. Combining a testing mindset with access to data allows us to unleash the potential power of both. Applying all the skills we use when testing applications to analysing the data we have available to us can help us decide when we should and shouldn’t rely on the data.
Imagine your team is in the middle of developing an important feature. The feature is worth hundreds of thousands of euros to the company and there’s a hard deadline of when this has to go out to customers. The team is working against the clock with less than a week to deliver. Suddenly a bug comes in. Your product is completely unusable for a customer. The display is totally broken. What do you do? How can you balance the risk of the time needed to investigate this issue with the hard deadline for the feature? The answer to all these questions is simple. Data. When Heather’s team asked her how risky it was to not action this bug fix, she could confidently say it was incredibly low. She could see from our usage statistics that less than 0.05% of our users were experiencing this issue and there was a workaround for what they were encountering.
Join Heather to explore how data took decision-making process to the next level. You’ll get insights into how leveraging the data available can bring whole new perspectives on the risk your business and team need to mitigate.
What you’ll learn
From this talk you will learn:
Session details
A short note from Heather on her talk
Heather Reid
Heather started her career as a mathematician and software developer. As a result of her advocacy for the end users and code quality, she moved to a testing role. Springboarded by her passion for quality and wanting to do a good job as the first and only tester in the company, she began to get more and more involved with the software testing community to help her learn everything she could to shine in this role. Heather continues to be passionate about delivering quality experiences to customers by encouraging collaboration within and across teams.