Forte Spotlight on Quality Engineering (December 2024)

Welcome to the December issue of our Quality Engineering newsletter.

I'm honored to lead our Quality Engineering delivery teams that provide quality assurance, performance testing, test automation and mobile app testing services.

-- Lee Barnes, Chief Quality Officer, Forte Group

Spotlight On: Past Events

Earlier this month I attended the ELC Chicago Holiday Meetup. I enjoyed meeting engineering, product and QA leaders. The event featured a talk by Tom Simon . Tom's book is titled "Changeocity: Change With Velocity - A Leader's Guide to Getting THERE Faster, With Less Disruption, and Fewer Casualties."

Forte provided complimentary copies of Tom's book to attendees. In his talk, Tom helped us think about leadership, change management, pivoting and more. Thanks to the ELC Chicago Chapter for hosting this event and for the opportunity to sponsor it. I'm looking forward to more chapter events in 2025.

Spotlight On: AI in Software Testing

To get the most out of AI in testing, we need to understand how it can best help us, not just rely on whatever the marketing buzz is telling us.

I remember how people were buzzing about record-and-playback test automation back in the day, as well as “codeless” test tools more recently.  We’ve all heard similar promises before. The issue is that the expectations are set by the companies selling the tools, instead of the engineers who actually use them.

It’s important that you be in control when it comes to how you use AI in your testing. While AI can certainly bring a lot to the table, it’s essential to make sure you’re setting the terms for how you’ll use it.

Don’t just jump on the bandwagon because it’s the hot new thing. My latest blog post covers:

• Where to begin with AI in testing
• Avoiding the magic box mentality
• LLMs and Prompt Engineering
• Moving Ahead with AI in testing

Read the post, "Exploring AI in Software Testing."

Spotlight On: Observability 2.0 in QA

Observability, a term once reserved for system operators and site reliability engineers, is now something that every QA professional should understand.

Observability 2.0, as defined by Charity Majors , Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, takes us beyond traditional monitoring, which I’d call "Observability 1.0." 

This advancement offers QA teams the ability to dive deeper, finding the root causes of intermittent or complex issues that traditional monitoring systems struggle to expose. Observability 2.0 is about understanding systems with a depth and breadth that allows teams to ask unanticipated questions of their data and get meaningful answers.

Read more in my blog post, "Getting To The Root of Quality Issues: Why QA Needs Observability 2.0."

Thank You

Thanks for reading – let me know what you thought of this month's issue. Happy holidays!

– Lee Barnes, Chief Quality Officer, Forte Group