Test driven development

While individual team members may have specializations, everyone on the team should have all the skills and roles to deliver working software. When we embed QA engineers in our teams, we ensure a close collaboration between:

• Quality engineers and product owners. Quality engineers' deep understanding of the requirements allows them to create test cases before development starts, and helps developers understand the full scope of work, leading to a higher quality product.
• Quality engineers and developers. In many cases, we practice an approach similar to pair programming, where QA engineers work with developers on implementing a feature.

Once the development process is established and the team has enough skills to deliver, quality engineers will automate all aspects of testing, including:

• Test data management.     
• Dependency management and service virtualization.
• Functional and integration testing.
• Performance testing.
• All other non-functional requirements testing including stability, security, and more.

Test automation is not complete until it is integrated into the continuous delivery pipeline. To achieve test driven development, integration must start with source code management. Automated tests typically share all the techniques that the development team uses to manage code, including the branching strategy and versioning. QA engineers also ensure that test environment preparation and automated test execution are properly configured in the CI/CD pipeline, notifying developers of defects early in the process.