In this episode we’ll be speaking with Neeraj Tripathi about his Principles of Software Quality Management. What I really like about this episode is that Neeraj has a ton of experience with software quality management and has worked across multiple organizations on many cross-functional teams. I think his breadth of knowledge really shines through in this episode. So if you’re having issues with software quality management, prepare to hear some knowledge bombs because Neeraj shares actionable advice for almost all the questions I asked of him.

About Neeraj

Neeraj is an information technology leader with over twenty years of industry experience. He has spent his career in various capacities, working for some of the top IT consulting companies and specializing in leading large QA organizations. In his consulting days, Neeraj helped many clients build and transform their software QA Organizations. Neeraj has hands-on experience in leading and building enterprise-wide QA organizations for Fortune 10 companies, and is currently leading the global QA COE for Infor, one of the world’s largest software startups.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• I want to focus our conversation on software quality assurance. My perspective on customer from a QA organization perspective, that QA, a quality assurance organization is the best buddy or should be best buddy with the customer, the reason being when organization building software, obviously they have an idea or concept to promote that on the market. They should be basically not only looking at the customer requirement. They should be putting themselves in the customer shoes and thinking about if this solution we are providing to customer, how they can consume? What are the different scenarios they should be using this solution?
• To be frank, nowadays it’s easy to measure the customer experience as it’s been before because of the social network and the social media you can easily, if you are building an app, by rating of your app you know that your user experience is better on the app. The other major one irrespective of you are on social media or not, it is your customer retention, and the getting referral is key measurement in terms of your quality and user experience. That metrics is directly proportional. If you’re getting a more referral on your product, it means your user experience is better and vice versa, and same thing with your retention percentage of your customer. If you can retain many customer on your application for your product, I think that’s important metrics for quality or customer perspective too.
• One of the things which as a leader they should be doing to enable their resources to do better job in the quality world is having them involved actively. When I saw actively, QA involvement, what I have seen is many QA team or QA team members, they will get involved whether in operational meeting or the requirement phase when they go into those meetings, and their involvement will be very passive because their mindset is my turn has not yet come. My turn is when the development will deliver the product to me. I will test it. I’ll find the defect. That’s where I will be more active. The leader has to change that mindset. They need to make sure when the resources, QA resources joining these early meetings, they are actively contributing.
• There are many star testing specific conferences. Even if not everybody can attend, I think the QA team should be following up in terms of what are the topics the speakers are talking about? That’s important for them to understand what’s happening in the world of quality assurance. The second aspect which I highly encourage not only for QA professional, for everybody actually in IT, to keep the eye on the digital world. Things are changing left and right, and I’ll give you an example of why I continue to say that QA professional needs to continue to hone their skill is take again, the QA team. If they are doing the devices testing or the browser testing, especially the devices testing, Joe, what I have seen is many QA organization, they continue to buy devices because QA team says, “I need to test with iPad. I need to test with iPhone 6. I need to test with Android. I need to test with this.” Then obviously organization think it’s important because customers are using that, and they need to have those kind of devices.
• From the reputability or usability perspective, the leader or whoever is the team lead from the QA automation perspective needs to think about if I’m choosing a tool, is that tool consistent across my organization? The tool selection becomes important. When I’m selecting a tool and building a framework, is this framework scalable given my organization size, so that if I need to continue to increase my automation and maintain the script, can I do this particular tool or this framework? That’s where I call it as repeatable and usable. If you build a framework, and you can keep building on further automation, that’s definitely the right thing to do. Similarly, if you have your test team or QA team who are using, just very simple example for everybody. If every time they are using a login to their application to start testing, do we really need to do that manual?
• I think again the best advice, as I said, is a customer centric, customer focus, what your customer perspective is is key for any QA organization. If I need to say one word or one sentence, they need to think about how they are the best buddy of their customer and how they can help them instead of helping their own organization.

Connect with Neeraj

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neeraj-tripathi-6b999a6
• Company: Infor
• Twitter: @NeerajT2016

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