DevOps and QA: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Happy Spring!

We’ve got another panel lined up for you at next month’s yvrTesting Meetup! This time, we’ll be discussing QA’s role in a growing DevOps world.

DevOps is one of the biggest buzzwords in IT these days. Everyone is learning everything that they can and trying to figure out what place it has in their environment. QA is no different. If you are a QA professional, can you be DevOps as well? Who owns the CI and Build pipelines? Should a QA be playing on production?

The terms we often use are not so distinct or standardized that the answers to these questions are obvious. For this Meetup, we’ve gathered a group of expert industry panelists ready to have a moderated discussion about these questions and any others that you might want to ask.

Panelist Bios

Sean Wilson, Development Director at Electronic Arts: Sean Wilson is a Development Director at Electronic Arts working in the Quality Verification Engineering department and responsible for the FIFA, NHL and UFC game titles. Sean started his career in Quality Assurance as a black box tester way back in 1998 and over the years has had the opportunity to work in a variety of industries. In 2004 he moved out of the individual contributor space and into management roles, eventually working his way up to being a Director of Quality Assurance in 2013. Seeing a gap in how the Agile methodology was implemented in software projects, Sean decided move away from QA in 2014 in order to focus on Project and Program Management. Sean is a keen follower of the evolution of Agile development and test methodologies.

Peter Nguyen, Director of Product Engineering at Create Music Canada: Peter Nguyen is the Director of Product Engineering at Create Music Canada where he drives the technology strategy and fosters a healthy development environment in an emerging company. Peter has been working in the tech industry for over 10 years, taking on a variety of architectural and leadership positions. He is a strong believer in open and transparent communication and works to break down communication barriers between regional and interdepartmental teams. Outside of work, Peter delves into a number of developing side projects and keeps up to date with tech trends such as cryptocurrency.

Shane Gearon, Senior Software Developer at Hootsuite: Shane is a Senior Software Developer, working on the Production Operations and Delivery team at Hootsuite, maintaining the infrastructure for over 100 build pipelines supporting up to 50 production deploys a day. He has a passion for infrastructure as code and bringing developers and operations closer together. Coming from a QA / Automation background, Shane loves finding manual tasks that can be automated to improve efficiency and developer morale. Outside of work he enjoys drawing comics, making podcasts and anything fun and creative.

Jim Peers, QA Practitioner at PQA Testing Ltd.: Jim Peers is a QA Practitioner at PQA Testing, with more than sixteen years of experience in software development and testing in multiple industry verticals. After working in the scientific research realm for a number of years, Jim moved into software development, holding roles as tester, test architect, developer, team lead, project manager, and product manager. A trusted technical advisor to clients, Jim creates test strategies, and mentors and assists testers on multiple projects. Jim has become PQA's foremost expert on BDD and is the core content developer for PQA's 'Testing-Focused BDD' framework.

Join us, spread the word, come to learn, and prepare your own questions! If you’d like to avoid talking in front of a crowd, feel free to send us your questions ahead of time as well.

Note: April’s Meetup will be held at Mahoney & Sons at Canada Place. Our reservation begins at 5:15PM, you are not required to order anything. So go ahead and RSVP!

See you there.