Jeroline
Hello everyone and welcome to it's another exciting webinar from the change leader series break free so today we'll be looking at the topic mastering quality assurance for stress-free software releases my name is Jeroline.
Jeroline
And I'll be your host for today so for those who may not be familiar with Pcloudy we are a cloud-based testing platform offering 5000 plus real devices and browser combinations for mobile and web.
Jeroline
App testing key features of Pcloudy include uh continuous testing devops Advanced automation AI based visual testing real-time test analytics self-healing accessibility testing and much more.
Jeroline
So with integration with popular testing Frameworks and tools and Round the Clock premium support Pcloudy is trusted by 300 K plus registered users.
Jeroline
Right from small businesses to large Enterprises next slide please so now about break free so breakfree was an idea that burst out of the need for change in the testing domain.
Jeroline
So we've seen the testing industry evolve and grow over the decades as a few leaders took the risk to break free from traditional approaches towards testing and come up with a lot of new.
Jeroline
Ideas and practices and we believe that this change can can be accelerated at a much faster pace so we took the liberty of identifying and inviting a few uh change leaders who are breaking.
Jeroline
The mold and embracing change to see the QA industry evolve and that's what Break Free is all about our hope is that these sessions would spark ideas in each one of you to be.
Jeroline
The change uh in the QA industry for the industry to grow into greater leaps and bonds so with that uh let me welcome the change leader for today Priyanka Helder hello.
Jeroline
Next slide uh please so Priyanka has over uh 15 years of experience in quality engineering having worked with big companies like Oscar Health GoodRx Sony and Dell among others currently she's leading the quality.
Jeroline
Engineering and devops team at Oscar Health uh Priyanka who was born in India now resides in California us and is building her career implementing QA teams to use Technologies like kubernetes uh visual validation.
Jeroline
Test stabilization pipelines and cicd for each code deployment so she loves to tackle technical challenges with the help of modern Technologies and Priyanka has.
Jeroline
Also won the world Bug Battle Championship 2014 and has also been a speaker at several major Tech events outside of work Priyanka enjoy is traveling trying out new food and spending time with the.
Jeroline
Daughters. So today Priyanka is here with us today to share her knowledge with us, so without any further ado, let me hand it over to the speaker for today.
Priyanka Halder
Thanks.
Priyanka Halder
So much Ellen and I'm super excited to introduce my new talk this year regarding release management um so again this talk was an idea as I was designing release management for a couple of.
Priyanka Halder
My companies in the past being healed and good RX where I started when the company was really small and.
Priyanka Halder
Then we failed that we have to tame the chaos right and we have to have a control design process how releases work when we grow at a very hyper growth space it's not possible.
Priyanka Halder
To tap on to qa's shoulder and say hey test it and we're gonna go live tonight right and it becomes very painful for QE uh.
Priyanka Halder
So given that in mind this talk will give you the pointers when you reach to that phase where like scalability is an issue and you need to adopt something you need to educate your.
Priyanka Halder
Peers and you need to educate your higher ups what Frameworks and what tooling and what different processes you need to make your releases more smoother.
Priyanka Halder
Right from chaos to control so hopefully you all will like it so let's uh get started with that I want to start with a quote from our Oscar X Oscar CTO nitu she said.
Priyanka Halder
The most important once again I have this on my screen the most important improvements are always feature facing you need to.
Priyanka Halder
Also consider people cost and mandatory costs when you think about adding value right I I very much less on it with this quote.
Priyanka Halder
Because a lot of time companies only think about okay we have to be really polished when it's user facing but like if you do not think about developer productivity you do not think about.
Priyanka Halder
Your team engagement like there are costs associated with it that gonna affect the the feature that our customer facing.
Priyanka Halder
Right um so like release management is one aspect lot of small companies ignore but at the end it becomes.
Priyanka Halder
So huge um that at that time making it a process becomes a huge deal so I would encourage everybody who is who has joined our call today uh encourage their peer to get get.
Priyanka Halder
More involved from the beginning right and and make sure that um they are educating their peers so we gonna break this session into three uh section.
Priyanka Halder
Right what what are the various incidents why why are they happening and how can we solve them so like people who like us who are into testing one thing we deal every day is.
Priyanka Halder
Incident incident is something that it's a bug that is already in production and that causes Lord of churn right um during our day-to-day work.
Priyanka Halder
So we have to find out what why and how of incident before we go and design our release management process.
Priyanka Halder
Right so let's agree what release management means to your company right it could be a lot of things and and agreeing on a definition gonna definitely help you start designing it.
Priyanka Halder
So again release management do we have shared and understanding like one lot of time I have seen release management means various things to various people in the company.
Priyanka Halder
Right so it could mean improve the quality efficiency and speed of updating software it could mean you specify techniques such as prioritization metrics continuous delivery automation uh devops Agile development that provides structure necessary.
Priyanka Halder
To plan and schedule manage software development right it also has various components so change management process is hugely associated with release management availability of test environments is hugely associated with release management branching and.
Priyanka Halder
Testing is hugely associated with release management right um so again like you have to Define what it means and you have to have the chair understanding.
Priyanka Halder
Because if you define release management something or kind of Define it something very differently then it won't be a success.
Priyanka Halder
Right so best practices let's talk about so when we start thinking about release management process we have to first starts with learning the best practices in this genre.
Priyanka Halder
Right what all needed to be there before you can make a release management design successful so the first thing comes to my mind it automate uh what you can stop if not deployed in.
Priyanka Halder
Staging so have a gate which will tell you that it's not ready to move it to production stop if unit test is not passing stop if if test plan is not attached.
Priyanka Halder
So when you are again designing the release management you have to you have to make sure you have this top gaps.
Priyanka Halder
Right so get this pointed and make sure you have this in place these are prerequisite before you can go ahead and start designing minimize or eliminate downtime.
Priyanka Halder
So to minimize and eliminate downtime you have to have more comprehensive testing so go back and check like what is your level of testing do you guys do any release planning do you have.
Priyanka Halder
Enhanced monitoring when you take any change to production do you have ability to roll back right and establish a clear requirements and acceptance criteria.
Priyanka Halder
So these are very much needed and best practices and prerequisite before you start thinking about a more controlled release management design.
Priyanka Halder
So now let's deep dive into various issues that we Face uh when we think about uh release management right.
Priyanka Halder
So missing quality gate again like most of the companies that I have worked for uh they had no maintained percentage for unit tests.
Priyanka Halder
So most of the companies will say oh we have we have good amount of units but what is good can you quantify it with a percentage number I think industry standard says 80 or.
Priyanka Halder
More unit test coverage or passing rate of unit test is is the standard right are you following that do you have your own metrologist to follow it if not start thinking about it how.
Priyanka Halder
You gonna enable your developer to maintain that no defined way to test grpc API functional again like maybe we just have unit test layers nobody thinks about the different layer of testing it's very.
Priyanka Halder
Important when you are in microservices you need to test your API layers you need to test your database layers you need to test your functional layers you need to test your non-function layers.
Priyanka Halder
Right no guard rail test in staging before going to prod uh I should say like there are like a lot of companies when they're small they don't even think about test environments at all.
Priyanka Halder
Uh they just have their own local environment and they just push their code from their laptop so whenever you are making your product uh customer facing and.
Priyanka Halder
Now you are a company who serves customer you absolutely have to think about uh guard drills in in staging before going to production think about test environment when you're small otherwise again it becomes.
Priyanka Halder
Like non-maintainable the next current issue so I want to come I want to discuss is communication again communication is key for any company uh you have to make sure that no Upstream Downstream communication.
Priyanka Halder
Is impacted right um so uh you have to make sure that when you have microservices layer everybody is talking to everyone.
Priyanka Halder
So just think about like if you have 50 micro services and there are maybe 25 teams handling two to micro Services together if they do not have a mapping like who impact whom upstream.
Priyanka Halder
And downstream it will be a mad house right like they might be doing their own continuous Improvement or continuous development but they are not communicating to the team who are getting impacted or who.
Priyanka Halder
They are not communicating to them who is impacting that particular team right then it will be impossible to design or release a management process that will be successful.
Priyanka Halder
So creating that mapping and making sure the whole company understand that whole map like which microservice talk to which microservices who are upstream and downstream customers is absolutely needed no process to do collaborated.
Priyanka Halder
Integration tests again once you understand the Upstream Downstream Services you have to figure out what kind of integration test needed again we all love unit testing we all love functional testing but they are.
Priyanka Halder
Inside their own world right once you are done making sure that okay your feature Works your own Island works you have to connect to the others component and make sure that integrating with other.
Priyanka Halder
Component works because just think about an analogy of a car right we have four tires all four tires make sure.
Priyanka Halder
Okay they are rotating but when we put it in a car they are not working together how pathetic that can be.
Priyanka Halder
Right so like we have to integrate it together and make sure it is making the car progress right non-existent automation test and end-to-end test.
Priyanka Halder
So again a lot of companies does not think about automating their test or end-to-end test they rely on only unit tests or manual or release testing I would totally encourage like as a part.
Priyanka Halder
Of communication make sure that you are talking about automation test you are making sure your end-to-end tests are existing and and you are starting to think about it before you jump on to your.
Priyanka Halder
Release management process because ultimately if you're looking at cicd pipelines that will be your driver right that's the epitome of success that you want to reach like your automated tests are telling you you.
Priyanka Halder
Are ready to go to production or not so next one will be deep diving on strategy about designing the release management process.
Priyanka Halder
So let's divide it into some short term and uh long-term goals so a short-term goal where we we want the expected return rate to be 20 to 30 what that mean is like when.
Priyanka Halder
You will be uh introducing the changes that I am outlining here you will see the success rate of going to production with minimum uh incident will increase like 20 to 30 percent.
Priyanka Halder
So if you are seeing 100 uh incident a month after you implement all these changes you should see a reduction of 20 to 30.
Priyanka Halder
So that means your incident will go down to a 70 to 80 percent right so first one is change logs prevent error by enhancing communication and dashboarding lot of time again in my experience.
Priyanka Halder
I have seen like the whole company has no communication what is being live right like it's very hard to figure out like what is going like for team a being in a team B.
Priyanka Halder
Right there's no common dashboard there is no communication that floats around maybe there is here and there slack channels but it's very hard to follow.
Priyanka Halder
Right it's not on our face uh to understand or it's it's not easy to go back to and figure out.
Priyanka Halder
Okay on 24th May what did we release if we can make it a process our life will be like a lot easier.
Priyanka Halder
So if something happens in production we can go back and we can tie it to the change log that.
Priyanka Halder
Okay this has impacted by this change what did we miss did we miss Upstream Downstream communication did we miss integration testing did we miss uh test that was needed like.
Priyanka Halder
Then like debugging will be super easy jeera priority upfront leveling of high level impacted change categorizing High mid low again jeera I I took the liberty to just call it call out a tool.
Priyanka Halder
But jeera is a change management tool that most companies uses there are other tool as well um so like feel free to replace it with the tool that you use um but again training.
Priyanka Halder
Your team to categorize the Imp changes with impacts will help you design your release management because then you can treat them differently.
Priyanka Halder
Right we might not put a lot of effort it's a low impact change because even if it's broken in production doesn't matter but for high and made you might want to design a very.
Priyanka Halder
Intricate uh release management documentation of monitoring before going live again when we are small and we are few people companies we don't think about monitoring production monitoring at all.
Priyanka Halder
So make sure that your team is adopting to some sort of monitoring there are various tools that gives you this options of observability uh monitoring continuously for fail failures like 500 402s will give.
Priyanka Halder
Your teams lot of Leverage uh to do a better release management right so just think about our example like you took some changes live to production immediately you're monitoring detect something is going wrong.
Priyanka Halder
A lot of 500 it Pages through some tool like pager Duty and you are able to roll back immediately.
Priyanka Halder
Right you don't want to wait on your customers to say hey you just release something today and my whole whole flow is broken jira and TMS.
Priyanka Halder
Yeah integration so again TMS here is test management system it's always gonna give you a lot of benefit if you have a test management software uh there is test rail there is qmetry.
Priyanka Halder
Right you you should have a unified way to attach your test cases to a change so that you know that what various kind of testing you have done what is the coverage percentage again.
Priyanka Halder
It gonna give you a lot of benefits to make your changes solid so narcube again so narcube is a tooling that gives you the coverage like where your test coverage are where it is.
Priyanka Halder
Lacking I also support multiple languages highly encourage people to either build their own mapping or use some tools like sonar Cube.
Priyanka Halder
So that they know what their percentage is so that they can integrate it in their CI CD pipelines and.
Priyanka Halder
Then again the observability tool right like clean up your observability uh Fair tools monthly so if you have monitors who are just not monitoring who are just noises and does not give you a.
Priyanka Halder
Lot of inputs that are good for you make sure that you have a process that you go back monthly and make sure that you go through the monitoring and see that which ones are.
Priyanka Halder
Actually helping and which ones are just noise so disable them let's talk about some long term goals so the short-term ones will be very easy to implement maybe three to six months.
Priyanka Halder
Right long term goals means like you have to work for a couple of quarters to uh bring this to life.
Priyanka Halder
Right so test tenant in production again in a lot of companies who are very micro Services oriented building a test environment is a nightmare for them.
Priyanka Halder
Right like just think if we have only one test environment 40 or 500 microservices who is pushing what how do you make sure that when you are doing your testing in a lower environment.
Priyanka Halder
It's the environment which is very much resonating your production so one thing that I learned uh from some of the big companies like uber and uh others who are in this microservices world was.
Priyanka Halder
Creating the test and tenant in production so what they did was they have two different kind of tenancy right all the services are production but they have two tenancy one is like production tenancy.
Priyanka Halder
One is non-production tenancy you could first test using non-production tenancy and then you can launch it in production tenancy.
Priyanka Halder
Right so like that gives you the power of not maintaining multiple environment but just switch reaching the tenancy you will be able to test exactly production replica continuous test pipeline again like automate your.
Priyanka Halder
Test as much as possible and then put it in a pipeline so that you can very well reap the benefit that is your change ready to go to production or not versioning make sure.
Priyanka Halder
That you do use versioning so it's very important to give a version number to your each change so that like you can readily roll back or you can readily go forward when you are.
Priyanka Halder
Ready to go but again these gonna fetch you 20 to 30 percent err expected return rate but it gonna take you time to get there and build it.
Priyanka Halder
Because these are complex changes to put in so implementation time right so short term takes two to three months as I told you we can quickly implement the processes and track the prevention rate.
Priyanka Halder
Midterm it takes 6 to 12 months uh can iteratively build environments but it would need three to four quarters we need lot of Team involvement if you are a micro Services world uh long.
Priyanka Halder
Term uh takes again more than 12 months ideal solution but need complete infrastructure overall planning implementation costing right so.
Priyanka Halder
Now let's talk about what should be our goal when we thought about think about release management right again back to communication you will hear me saying communication communication communication.
Priyanka Halder
Because communication is mother of all the problem uh as I quoted down like 60 to 80 of all incidents are result of poor cross team communication lack of proper integration testing like it's amazing.
Priyanka Halder
Right like if we could learn to communicate better half of our problem or maybe most of our problem will be solved.
Priyanka Halder
Right um so change language weekly release planning a lot of us practice agile right but we only think in terms of our own Sprint our own team like how we can think about a.
Priyanka Halder
More streamlined process of of a release right inside a agile process so I release ticket type might be what we are missing in today's world.
Priyanka Halder
Right like projection what's going out coming week from each of those team and putting it in a dashboard so that everybody in the company can take a.
Priyanka Halder
Look at okay can solve lot of this problem so just think about a real scenario I'm team a I I go to the release dashboard and I see.
Priyanka Halder
Okay Team B who is uh who is my Upstream team is releasing let's say a feature ABC but I see I'm not ready to take that feature in there needs to be some changes.
Priyanka Halder
In my side as well for them to release that changes otherwise my whole flow breaks right looking at that projection I immediately find that bug and I go and I communicate to them hey.
Priyanka Halder
I think during requirement uh you've forgotten that we are your Downstream team we need to do our integration testing to make sure that you have backward compatibility or we need to.
Priyanka Halder
Also make it and make it compatible with us by doing XYZ chains so do you see that we shifted the bug in to left and the cost will be hugely safe.
Priyanka Halder
Because if you would have taken the taken the change to production and then it would have broken it would have caused customer dissatisfaction it would have caused fire incident and we had to do.
Priyanka Halder
Some something like immediately with less testing and and very stressful way of mitigating it right tagging dependent team so once you have the release type and.
Priyanka Halder
Then once you have the Upstream Downstream mapping team mapping you can tag those dependent teams so that it's communicated very easily.
Priyanka Halder
Right signing off contract testing integration testing in jira so again like make sure that you have integration of test management inside jira and you make sure that there is a sign off that happened.
Priyanka Halder
On contract or integration testing before you take that ticket to Life Financial impact projection again if your company uh works in the industry where the financial impact can be huge depending on the high.
Priyanka Halder
Impact changes make sure your outright projecting it as a part of your release management so that you're handling them in a proper way upfront money monitoring planning and documentation make sure each change management.
Priyanka Halder
Change ticket has the monitoring documented like how you will be monitoring it once we make it a process it becomes a muscle memory.
Priyanka Halder
Right so now you are forced to think about okay when I take this change to production not only I'm just taking it to production and saying.
Priyanka Halder
Okay it's done I'm also monitoring it so if something bad happened I will be able to rectify it immediately dashboard to leadership again tracking of BR versus ticket release uh is is one of.
Priyanka Halder
The tool that has helped me a lot lot of companies so I highly recommend that that you use it a unit test percentage logged in cheetah again if you log it in jira how.
Priyanka Halder
Much is the percentage that passing per unit test it will be crystal clear for everyone um in the team that do we need more functional testing do we need more integration testing and again.
Priyanka Halder
You make sure you're using a test case management tool um if you if you can because ultimately when you become big and uh when when the team become very complicated that helps you it's.
Priyanka Halder
Not only helps you with the documentation it also helps you as a um knowledge Source right it's a lot of people Gonna Leave the company they're gonna take their tribal knowledge with them but.
Priyanka Halder
If you have a test management tool those tribal knowledge could be preserved using test management tool the next goal should be environment.
Priyanka Halder
Right so we have to think about a lower environment which a lot of companies misses right we need a staging environment pre-prod environment uh end-to-end testing integration and contract testing.
Priyanka Halder
So enable pre-podcasting right enable uh collaboration where multiple team getting impacted and need contract and integration testing build isolation from production.
Priyanka Halder
So don't have a hodgepodge environment where half of your connection is pointing to production and half has lower environment.
Priyanka Halder
Then there is a chances that during your testing you're gonna impact production as well so like making it completely isolated is very very important bill required tooling to use robustly example add and it.
Priyanka Halder
Is um uh erase services so this is a particular example that I have given but like we'll require tooling.
Priyanka Halder
So you if you are suppose you if you are testing a functionality which gonna impact the data you have to make sure that you are building two to reset that testing data again and.
Priyanka Halder
Again in lower environment right automation testing pipeline again every steps of your goal automation testing should be your top goal on the list.
Priyanka Halder
Right without that release management won't be successful again the third goal should be defining roles and responsibilities in a lot of times the companies they know they want to reduce incident they want to.
Priyanka Halder
Have a proper release management process but they don't know who are the different key players uh in in that whole process.
Priyanka Halder
Right so jotting down like who are the key players and who will do what gonna help you defining your release management process.
Priyanka Halder
Right for example developers they should write the unit test and Achieve 90 they should write API test um and and make sure that they agree with the P0 test cases that that is written.
Priyanka Halder
Right performance they should make sure they're using a tool like Locus to Benchmark that they are continuously keeping the performance High functional they should make sure they validate the happy path.
Priyanka Halder
Because again quality is a teamwork it's not it should not be only only with QE it should be a whole theme process.
Priyanka Halder
Right so for QE or for product what we can think about their role can be they should be thinking about the bigger picture they should be thinking about the mapping of Upstream Downstream they.
Priyanka Halder
Should be thinking about the edge cases the cross browser testing right manual automation uh tests like augment developer like if you talk to developer and and think Beyond.
Priyanka Halder
Right so I think we are very good at that and then again benchmarking performance making sure security and accessibility tests are performed wherever it's needed I want to pause for a second and highlight.
Priyanka Halder
Be cloudy here because pick up cloudy is a tool with support in almost all of this right they help us with cross browser they have 500 plus devices they help us with the native.
Priyanka Halder
Mobile testing so I highly encourage you go and and check their platform and and maybe uh that's something you should think about integrating with when when you think about designing your release management product.
Priyanka Halder
And uh em so em is engineering manager acceptance testing so after our developer and QE or product manager does their own set of testing it's important that we have a role where a release.
Priyanka Halder
Approver actually goes through the test results reporting and make sure yes the correct things are done in order right.
Priyanka Halder
So again uh a tidbit that I have added here x percentage incident happens as a lack of definition and understanding who owns what testing I have written here x.
Priyanka Halder
Because this numbers varies right in your company but you will see if you provide this uh definition of various key members role in your release management half the battle is owned testing best practices.
Priyanka Halder
And next goal should be making sure we jot down best practices of testing if it is a front-end feature unit test functional test cross browser performance and security accessibility if it is a API.
Priyanka Halder
Either grpc or HTTP again you can do unit test API make sure you're testing positive negative edge cases you are doing chain testing of integration.
Priyanka Halder
Right so only testing your own API is not enough you have to make sure you are chaining with other API that consumes your API and making sure the integration test bar make sure your.
Priyanka Halder
API performance and securities are tested as well and some other things that you should be again thinking about DB migration data feeds data testing infra changes uh claims it's very um claims is something.
Priyanka Halder
You can ignore it it's it's more on like medical companies that deals with that so my previous company good addicts and my current company uh Oscar deals with it but again if you can.
Priyanka Halder
Think about is the highest priority feature right and Ops config again if you have a Ops Team who deals with very high priority configuration features make sure um that you make sure that the test.
Priyanka Halder
Coverage is is to a standard right before you standardize the release management again 30 incident happens as a lack of understanding what kind of testing needed like a lot of time due to lack.
Priyanka Halder
Of a lot of time due to lack of time or or even understanding or knowledge team just ignores the required testing that is needed it will be your duty to educate your peers and.
Priyanka Halder
Hire up to make sure that the correct coverage is there the fifth one is branching so again red green uh Cannery deployment branching um into branches.
Priyanka Halder
So one of the very successful release strategy I had for heal was maintaining two two branches we had a main branch and.
Priyanka Halder
Then we had a release Branch so everything that used to like first it was getting used to get developed in development Branch.
Priyanka Halder
Then we used to push it to release Branch as a we used to cut a release at a certain uh date or time we used to do the integration testing on that release once.
Priyanka Halder
That is approved to go to production we used to merge it to the main bands and it worked beautifully that was a micro Services world as.
Priyanka Halder
Well it worked beautifully uh for that company so you can choose one of the branching strategy as their version application again versioning is very important.
Priyanka Halder
So that you can roll back and roll forward and also you can stamp it in your jira ticket right to give a better Clarity Canada deployment deploy to one node to understand if if.
Priyanka Halder
The artifact hitting any infrared block again if you have Cannery deployment and you use lot of shirts you can choose to go partially live and and observe that if there is any roadblock ahead.
Priyanka Halder
Once you feel that okay it's green you can push it to the other shirts and you make sure that.
Priyanka Halder
Okay the release is successful 10 to 20 of the incident happen as lack of branching infra related issues which need robust roll back.
Priyanka Halder
Right and this strategy gonna help you uh design a robust release management so I think that's about it these are the the main key points I wanted to hit in in this whole presentation.
Priyanka Halder
Um and happy to take questions um very excited that I was able to present it to all of you and I hope that I have enlightened uh your knowledge about how to design the.
Priyanka Halder
Release Management in your own company do send me feedback on on my Twitter handle it's pretech Mom I'm also in LinkedIn.
Priyanka Halder
So do get connected with me, um, and I'm happy to chat about your process. Over to you, Jeroline.
Jeroline
Thank you Priyanka for a fantastic and informative presentation, uh.
Jeroline
So it's given a time now uh Priyanka will answer some of the questions uh that were sent to US during the presentation and uh audience if you have any more questions uh please ask.
Jeroline
Away um so here's the first question uh for you Priyanka so what are some common mistakes or oversights you've seen teams make uh during their release management process and how do you think that.
Jeroline
Can be avoided?
Priyanka Halder
Right, I think I cover that during my issue slide, right, so let's go back and check that out, um.
Priyanka Halder
So again like I have divided into various categories so if you go through my slides again I don't want to repeat it but these are some of the things that are like very common.
Priyanka Halder
And I have seen repeated pattern that companies misses right so you need to dig dive and jot down your issues here and like what I came across in my 15 plus years I have.
Priyanka Halder
Jotted down here and it could be different in your cases so maybe think about like what missing quality gate you have in your company what kind of different communication challenges you have uh what.
Priyanka Halder
Kind of maturity level you have right um so that that's where is your answer lies right once you jot down this you want to figure out that.
Priyanka Halder
Okay now I have the problems with me I have just have to map the solution to it right like ad hoc releases late night if anybody has permission to take changes to production.
Priyanka Halder
Right gonna make our life miserable so when you streamline it saying that okay our release uh timings are morning nine to evening five do not release afterwards uh without a release approval or without.
Priyanka Halder
A certain date gonna help you with a mature release management process, right, uh, one example.
Jeroline
Uh, here's the next question to you.
Jeroline
So given the rapid evolution of a lot of tech tools and platforms so how do you stay updated with the latest trends in quality engineering and devops and how do you integrate them in.
Jeroline
Your work?
Priyanka Halder
That's a great question, actually. I think uh, I have a couple of ways to learn about latest technologies, one is, um, I have very specific feeds that I follow on Twitter.
Priyanka Halder
It's hard to believe but Twitter is a huge pool of knowledge right like if you follow the right people you can get the information super faster.
Priyanka Halder
Right so I do that so any and every industry leader I follow them I I continuously seek uh like what they are up to what they are researching on.
Priyanka Halder
So I know like I have to do the same right the second thing I do is I go through a lot of this webinar and and conferences I not only speak to them but.
Priyanka Halder
I make sure I jot down or all the latest technology talks that I need to learn um and be top of my industry and third thing is I.
Priyanka Halder
Also like to go through like some of the tools are available outside so like blogs um yeah and and the newsletters that I we get for a couple of uh very industry veterans.
Priyanka Halder
So like I I go through them as and when I have time as well so webinar conferences blog Vlogs and Twitter these are my way of getting myself up to date with the industry.
Priyanka Halder
I also read all the industry papers like whenever there is like 2023 testing Trends how the industry is doing I will make sure I'm the.
Priyanka Halder
First one who read those so so I know where the trend is heading towards right a lot of time you will be hearing me talking about those if I don't know where it's heading.
Priyanka Halder
I cannot talk about them uh so yeah those are the couple of things that I do right it's a great ways to stay updated.
Jeroline
Okay, uh, here's another question for you. So as a quality engineering leader, how do you balance the need for speed in software releases for the equally important requirement for stability?
Priyanka Halder
That's another very good.
Priyanka Halder
Question again like educating figuring out the issues right and then educating my peer and higher-ups like where we need to put our concentration on like everybody loves to like push their changes super fast.
Priyanka Halder
Right but depending on where you are in your company if you are a small company with few thousands customer or you're a large company with few million customers.
Priyanka Halder
Right your impact is huge the way you do your testing so like you have to make sure that first as a leader you understand the impact and.
Priyanka Halder
Then you highlight the issues along with the mitigation strategy to your higher up so for example if I see the issue is we are heavily dependent on release testing and there is very much.
Priyanka Halder
Lack of Automation and unit testing is not cutting it my recommendation will be okay next quarter we have to budget and we have to figure out our goals to make sure our automation levels.
Priyanka Halder
Are uh in a certain like certain percentage before we can like or we in a certain percentage so that we can maintain the speed um of releases along with the quality we deserve.
Priyanka Halder
Right, and that's how I educate and communicate, which, uh.
Jeroline
So, here's another question for you, uh, so what should be the approach for dealing with bugs uh found in production environment.
Priyanka Halder
So I I'm not sure I understand the question completely but if the question is how do you handle incident you should have a full Incident Management process which is another topic very large topic.
Priyanka Halder
Right like how you detect those bugs how you get paged right uh what are the teams that get involved when they get paid for that bug found in production to make sure what's the.
Priyanka Halder
Impact of that bug how quickly you can get together RCA which is the root cause analysis document and then come to our conclusion how you will be resolving that.
Priyanka Halder
So again like I was fortunate enough to implement Incident Management uh in various companies would love to have that in a separate webinar where I go over the whole approach but usually having a.
Priyanka Halder
Methodical way of dealing right again how you monitor how you get page who all comes in how they collaborate how they figure out the root cause and impact and how they immediately fix it.
Priyanka Halder
Um, should be the way to go.
Jeroline
So, uh, Priyanka, how do you foresee the future of release management with the ongoing advancements with AI and machine learning?
Jeroline
So do you think these technologies will significantly change the way we manage software releases?
Priyanka Halder
Absolutely, like I am in love with generative AI, like it can help the way, and and the speed with.
Priyanka Halder
Speed right the way we write test cases and I'm hoping in future like it gonna be at a maturity level where we as a tester can utilize a open AI.
Priyanka Halder
Right and and just tell them this is my requirement give me all and like teach them train them to give us various uh different kind of testing or test cases and and it gonna.
Priyanka Halder
Within seconds give us all the test cases we need so definitely it gonna speed up our release management uh coming to tooling I think for years we have tooling like Audi uh which helping.
Priyanka Halder
Us with like cross browser and functional testing you know in our like lightning time right saves a lot of time like I remember like in previous life like we used to install all the.
Priyanka Halder
Browsers in our local we used to have a like Dell laptop and a Mac laptop to do Safari and all and you guys just solve it for us just go to a platform and.
Priyanka Halder
Test whatever we want to test it paralyze it do that right like test in inside a box and in a very time um efficient manner.
Priyanka Halder
So I'm hoping with help of AI like this gonna go another level where like we may be with the modeling or something we will be able to make sure that we have the.
Priyanka Halder
Right percentage covered um and and like we do not have to put our own brain into that and the AI gonna tell us.
Priyanka Halder
Okay this is your coverage or these are the tests you need to run um so yeah I'm looking forward to this AI Evolution and I I totally see that it's uh going to be.
Priyanka Halder
Reality pretty soon, right.
Jeroline
Then, uh, so thank you Priyanka for answering those questions and for the great presentation, it was a pleasure to have you with us today, and uh, thank you uh everyone.
Priyanka Halder
Who attended today's webinar uh and thank you for being an interactive bunch and uh we hope you found the webinar to be valuable and informative.
Jeroline
So remember keep breaking uh free and pushing the boundaries of what possible what's possible in the QA industry so see you at the.
Jeroline
Next break free session have a great day ahead.
