QE: Appendix
Glossary
We’re striving to use clear language, but there are a few words where it’s helpful to expound upon how we interpret them.
Craft Responsibility Definitions
The responsibilities defined below make up the foundation of the Quality Assurance craft:
- Testing Fluency: The skills required to evaluate software in order to collect information that identifies flaws, risks, and other barriers to releasing high quality software.
- Testing Strategy: The skill to leverage Testing Fluency to design, plan and execute testing efforts that prevent, mitigate, and/or elevate quality risks & issues quickly and accurately, enabling a clear assessment of quality.
- Quality Process Strategy: The skill to plan activities/practices focused on providing confidence that a product/service will fulfill requirements for quality . This includes effective documentation of the process, roles, responsibilities and procedures required to achieve effective quality management.
- Quality Assessment: The skill of analyzing quality data against a defined bar and communicating whether its being met
- Quality Advocacy: The skill of instilling quality best practices and customer advocacy as important elements of the EPD culture.
Detailed QA Collaborative Reach Definitions
Detailed QA Collaborative Reach at L2
QA Engineers support one or two teams that are small-to-medium in terms of the number of engineers whose surface areas are relatively straightforward in their complexity. These teams would be characterized by having 1 - 2 of the following:
- complex business logic
- complex technology
- cross interactions with multiple teams,
- need some fixes to processes and/or engineering culture
- wide surface area
Detailed QA Collaborative Reach at L3
QA Engineers typically support multiple teams, sometimes at the scope of an area. They take comprehensive ownership of quality and process issues on teams with moderate to high complexity. These teams are often characterized by 2-3 of the following challenges:
- complex business logic
- complex technology
- high volume of active feature development and/or large surface area
- interactions with many (typically 2 or more) teams
- small to moderate process and/or engineering culture issues
Detailed QA Collaborative Reach at L4
An L4 engineer typically takes comprehensive ownership of quality and process issues across an area or group depending on size. The teams they work with have a very high complexity, typically characterized by 3 or more challenges such as:
- complex business logic
- complex technology
- high volume of active feature development and/or large surface area
- interactions with many teams
- medium-to-large process and/or engineering culture issues