What's in a title?: Difference between revisions
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→I am a Software Quality Engineer
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'''April 2024''' | '''April 2024''' | ||
The job titles we have matter sometimes, but at other times not so much. | The job titles we have matter sometimes, but at other times not so much. Titles can limit people's understanding of what we do, but at times they convey exactly what we need to say with a minimum of words. | ||
Over the years I've had many job titles and roles, including | Over the years I've had many job titles and roles, including | ||
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* Tester | * Tester | ||
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* Quality Coach | * Quality Coach | ||
* Quality Analyst | * Quality Analyst | ||
* Radar Technician | * Weather Radar Technician | ||
| | | | ||
* Support Engineer | * Support Engineer | ||
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* Father | * Father | ||
* House dad | * House dad | ||
* Programmer | * Programmer | ||
* University Tutor | * University Tutor | ||
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Recently I've been thinking of what I am, and I've landed on | Recently I've been thinking of what I am, and I've landed on | ||
== I am a Software Quality Engineer == | == I am a Software Quality Engineer == | ||
I do feel a little conflicted because quality is an attribute of something, not really something we can engineer by itself. However, the title seems to have gained traction over recent years as meaning a broader engineering role focussed on software quality, which I can certainly sign up to. We build and engineer tools, systems, and processes to help us efficiently analyse and monitor the quality of software solutions. Testing is a wide and varied endeavour, but there is real value in being able to quickly get basic quality information about a code change through automation. The objective being to automate the boring and free up the tester to explore more and deeper. | |||
'''Automation''' of course, covers so much more than simply automating '''the product itself''', but also in preparing | |||
* the product to be ready for testing, | |||
* the local development environment, | |||
* the version control and branching strategy, | |||
* the CI/CD pipelines, | |||
* the test environments and infrastructure, | |||
* the test data in an environment, | |||
* the capture and aggregation of (test) environment logging and monitoring data, | |||
* and much more. | |||
All of these lend themselves to varying degrees of automation, whereas without automation, some of these tasks can become repetitive, tedious, and time consuming. I hold the view that creating the whole interconnected ecosystem necessary to efficiently analyse and monitor the quality of a software solution is a genuine engineering activity. | |||
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== My old (pre 2024) intro ... == | == My old (pre 2024) intro ... == |