4 trends shaping software quality this year

• 1 min read

2023 – what a year for those who build software!

First, a financing bubble made it so every software team needed to ship better software faster than ever. Then, a massive downturn made those same teams need to do more with fewer resources.

At Jam, we see an inside view on how teams across the industry are working and the radical shifts taking place. Here are the 4 trends in software quality we can share with you going into 2023.

  • Remote QA workers play a different role when every worker is remote. The distinction between “HQ” employee and “off-shore” contractor doesn’t matter when everyone is on Slack. Now with everyone remote, QA is just as connected to the engineering team as any other team member. As a result, QA is working more closely with developers throughout the entire development process, not only at the end.
  • Quality Engineering is the new DevOps. Rising consumer expectations has led to the emergence of Quality Engineering (QE) teams. QE works on quality holistically, from managing test automation to adding logging, monitoring and tracing, to setting up CI/CD, running stress testing, building internal tools, and leading discussions about best practices across engineering teams. In many ways, QE teams are a lot like traditional DevOps teams. But instead of a focus on serving the internal needs of developers, QE teams are focused on serving the interests of end users, ensuring that they get a great user experience.
  • Everybody is expected to QA now. In 2023, quality is no longer just a job function - it's company culture. Everyone on the team, from design and product management to support and sales, is expected to be involved in ensuring product quality. This means giving actionable feedback, dogfooding the software, and reporting issues. To support this shift, companies are investing in collaboration tools that allow teams to quickly share feedback in a clear way over a dedicated channel (where Jam comes in!).
  • Even startups have QA. While it was uncommon for startups to have dedicated QA even just a few years ago, it's becoming increasingly common for early startups, even as early as pre-launch, to bring on QA contractors.

Any we missed? We’d love to hear your perspective, and you can find the full article below.

Read the full article

Wishing you a bug-free year full of shipping.

Cheers to 2023, see you in the Jam. 🥂

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