Pillars of Quality: Building a Structured Test Program in Phases

As the lone tester amongst a sea of developers, Sylvia Solorzano struggled to scale reactive efforts into a cohesive program. Haphazard bug reports strained relationships and failed to provide direction. By installing a phased methodology based on industry best practices first, quality became her north star. Sylvia enshrined requirements traceability and manually executed test cases for each function delivered. Then she evaluated integrations between components and expanding to validate full system behavior as users would experience. Finally, leveraging test standards, she layered on regression suites, automated testing, and exploratory smoke tests as guardrails. Upfront test planning doesn't delay release by weeks when baked-in from sprint one. Armed with the roadmap to install and connect testing pillars can make what feels like an impossible task, a more seamless and less frustrating process - functionality, stability, reliability and design - engineers can prevent more defects before they ever impact users. Progressive approaches can bring quality confidence to agile chaos.