Turning the Quality of Your Deployment Pipeline Into a Team Task

A presentation at TestBash Manchester in in Manchester, UK by Areti Panou

It is around 16:00 on a Friday afternoon and somebody from the other end of the office says out loud: “Who is working on fixing the API tests?” A silence, as thick as a morning fog, covers the entire floor. Nobody has done anything.

Slowly, all eyes are turn towards the tester. How could she allow this to happen? When the API tests fail, the deployment pipeline is broken. When the pipeline is broken, there can be no deployment to production. The hope of a work-free weekend is slipping away…

This could be the beginning of a fictional, admittedly a bit corny, story. Unfortunately, in my experience, this is not something unheard of in an Agile software development team, where quality is a whole-team effort and not just the tester’s obligation.

So, how do we create a clear action plan to avoid such drama scenes?

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