My imperfect journey to the whole team owning quality..

Hi All,

This time we are bringing Francis Ho, Director of Quality Engineering at Auror, a startup that helps prevent retail crime, reduce loss, and making stores safer.
Auror works with some of the largest retailers in the region, like Walmart, Coles, and Woolworths. Francis has previously worked in companies of varying sizes and different sectors, like Healthcare, Fintech, and Big data. 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 society. In his spare time, he is busy exploring the world with his two years old son and listening to baby shark on repeat.

About the event :

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 Auror, 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 Auror, 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 are 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.

Nibbles and drinks will be provided as part of this meetup.

## Takeaways

The key takeaways of this talk are:

• 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 how our automation test strategy help enable us to release frequently multiple times a day
• 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