Finding the joy in quality assurance: A step-by-step approach that works!

Have you ever had a moment where you hold your breath as you push a big release or new feature live and hope that nothing terrible happens? We want you to save those heart-racing, thrill-seeking experiences for adventure vacations and netflix cliffhangers. In this talk we will walk you through an approach to QA (quality assurance) that will give you, your team and stakeholders confidence in the stability, polish and user experience of your website from the initial launch to every deployment after.

Joy is for everyone, and so is this presentation. The approach lives comfortably in accessible language, general process and planning, and we can get a bit more detailed when it comes to techniques and tools.

To find the joy in QA, you must approach it from multiple points:

• Understanding the differed Areas of QA - this is the philisophical side 
• Determining what devices and browsers will guide your process
• Establishing a baseline of priorities using anaylstics data and stakeholder KPI's 

Once you have all of the above, you can make a plan. And who doesn't love a good plan? Putting your plan into action will require that you address QA and different phases of the software lifecycle:

• Planning and discovery
• Development
• Pull requests and merging code 
• Internal review 
• Client review
• Pre-launch or deployment 
• Post launch or deployment 
• On-going maintenance 

Finally, our hope when you leave this talk is that you can be a champion of QA, too. You will be armed with a template to make a strong QA plan. You will know who needs to be involved, when and why. You will learn about where different people contribute to the manual QA process. You might be introduced or get a deeper understanding of where machines and code can help with QA. And ultimately, you will have the super knowledge that quality is ultimately subjective, so defining a process that everyone understands and supports will be essential to the success.