As someone who has spent most of their software career in testing, I know that pretty much everyone directly involved in shipping software gets involved in testing. Developers test plenty and that those in the product/business side sometimes, but not always, get involved in testing (particularly user focused testing). We also have tech support (or equivalent) getting involved around customer issues.
Quite often we talk about involving everyone in continuous testing and quality cultures. Testers / quality specialists are increasingly coaching these roles in who to test, document your testing and consider risks.
However there are areas of the business that where testing is important but we tend to forget about them. Infrastructure & operations. As well as the continuous delivery pipeline and our production environment, people are involved day to day in managing the infrastructure that we rely on to connect to the internet, access key services and of course allow us to work securely.
If you needed to change WiFi policies or introduce a new security measure, would you just make a change and forget about it? No there will be testing. Our infrastructure teams are well versed in planning and testing changes that happen in production.
One of the interesting things with my work, Cumberland Building Society, is that we’ve really started focusing on building relationships and collaboration here. Something that I’ve not seen before. Previously there may be the odd shared meeting but we were very much in silos. I’ve joined one of the Ops teams and am excited to learn more and also hopefully make a positive impact for the team.
So the next time you’re considering who to involve when sharing ideas around new testing approaches or who to engage to build that quality culture, don’t forget your infrastructure team. We rely on them, so let’s collaborate and support each other.