QA Testing Blog | Global App Testing

Leading Quality, a Revolutionary New Book for the Software Industry

Written by Nick Roberts | July 2019

We're super passionate about quality (as you might have guessed).

So we decided to write a book about it.

We call it Leading Quality. The software industry’s first-ever comprehensive guide on how to deliver great software and accelerate the growth of your company.

Here’s how it happened, and why it belongs on the desk of every great engineering and QA leader.

Chapter One: Humble Beginnings

We begin like any other good success story. With failure.

The year was 2013 and our tech startup was sinking. Fast.

Every time we fixed one problem, five more appeared.

Instead of focussing on the company’s future, we had to spend our time looking back at everything that was going wrong.

Bad reviews started to roll in. Customers were leaving. And, regardless of how hard we worked to resolve their issues, we simply couldn’t keep up.

It was relentless, very expensive, and above all...

enlightening

We’d been so caught up in the never-ending to-do list of a startup, that we had overlooked one essential factor. Quality.

The product that people were experiencing was not the same product that our engineering teams had spent hours crafting. Customers from around the world were reporting bugs across thousands of different devices, networks and operating systems.

And in the fast-paced nature of today’s tech industry, we knew we couldn’t be the only ones.

Over the next few weeks, we soon discovered a number of other leaders had found themselves in a similar position. People with great ideas, teams and products, all struggling to meet the demands of the ever-evolving tech industry. After all, how could they be expected to keep up with the constant stream of hardware and software releases?

Keep in mind that out of the 7.5 billion people that populate the 195 countries that are on this planet, 5 billion are estimated to have a mobile device.

That is a lot of variables.

We realised very quickly that this was a problem that needed a better solution.

Enter Global App Testing, and our journey into Leading Quality.


Chapter Two: Going global

Our mission was clear. To use our experience to help others instantly and effortlessly find the bugs that were impacting their users. By doing so, we could offer value with every test and contribute towards the growth of each company.

We quickly got to work and over the next 5 years found ourselves working with the likes of Facebook, Google and Shell, gaining insights from their top-performing teams. It was proof that, no matter how big your company is, there will always be bugs that need fixing.

In one particular example (detailed inside Leading Quality), we were able to open up a market of 262 million people to one of our customers.

So with our crowdsourced testing platform yielding massive results and over 25K testers worldwide, we turned our attention to what we now believe to be the greatest challenge currently facing the testing industry.

Leaders and testers are unable to effectively communicate the value of quality inside their company.

That’s right. The problem isn’t just with bugs located halfway around the world. They are in-house, with the company’s fundamental understanding of quality.

Leaders are up against varying viewpoints, conflicting metrics and internal politics, resulting in missed opportunities for growth.

Testers, on the other hand, are frustrated, struggling to communicate the impact of their work to those around them. The company misses out on valuable insights which could help retain customers and improve the product.

Both sides are unable to successfully communicate the value of quality inside their company.

Until now.


Chapter Three: Leading Quality

Leading Quality bridges that gap and sets a new gold standard for quality.

For the first-ever time, we provide leaders with a definitive guide on how to effectively communicate the value of quality throughout their entire company.

The book is split into three easy to master sections:

  1. Becoming a Leader of Quality - Leading a culture of quality and getting everyone on board.
  2. Mastering Your Strategic Quality Decisions - Providing you with the internal tools, infrastructure, and testing methods--and how that changes with the maturity of your teams and products.
  3. Leading Your Team to Accelerate Growth - The missing business side of translating engineering and QA efforts into business growth and customer value.

Each section has been designed in a way that will leave readers fully equipped to implement a highly effective quality strategy.

We’ve interviewed over 120 tech/QA leaders from around the world including Airbnb, Dell, Etsy, and Reddit so you can learn from the best.

Maybe you’re running the gauntlet of an early startup. Maybe you already understand that, to remain competitive, you need a fundamental shift in your company's culture on quality. Or perhaps you just want to be a better leader in software development.

Either way, the time is now to join the Leading Quality movement!

Order your copy today.