Lightning Talk: Trusting your Product: How to Think about Product Quality

Trust. Such a strange, emotional word in the straight-forward context of software quality. We're not about trust, we're about facts, right?We run tests, write test plans, perform experiments, monitor …

Trust. Such a strange, emotional word in the straight-forward context of software quality. We’re not about trust, we’re about facts, right?We run tests, write test plans, perform experiments, monitor products, track bugs. Where does trust come into play here?Unfortunately, all of our activities can’t prove the absence of defects, only their presence. Hence if we don’t find bugs, it doesn’t mean there aren’t any – it just means we haven’t looked in the right place. The question is: how do we deal with this?Thinking about software quality from the perspective of trust gives us a powerful tool to consider what we expect from our product and whether these expectations have been met.This talk is about how to effectively reason about trust, how to create as much as we require: through tests (and tests of what?), or monitoring, or whatever other tool we decide to use. It bridges the gap between vague, hard to grasp concepts and the practicalities of how to work with them day-to-day.