Quality with big Q
Building the Brazil SumUp Bank from scratch
Building a product from scratch is not an easy job even more when we talk about banking services where people trust their sweaty money will be well guarded and accessible whenever they need it. There is not much space left for non-working features, catastrophic errors, or long downtimes, so delivering with quality is a must and you can think that we needed to slow down to do it but in fact, we went from 0 to 100% in 6 months.
Quality is in every single aspect of creating a product, from the idea, passing through the UX research, the development, up to collect results and metrics from the final users, and retro feed the whole process.
Since the very beginning of SumUp Bank, as a Quality Engineer, I had the liberty of proposing and using anything that might help the team increase the quality of our product, so, in order to create the best core banking features — that were already researched and well defined — we started developing and testing it.
We created a bunch of tests to guarantee things were working as planned. Some examples of them are: unit, integration, end-to-end, smoke, exploratory and regression.
We also want to make sure we could handle non-functional aspects, like security, usability and performance, so we created tests for it too.
But tools themselves are not the solution, they are ways of getting things done and I could not use all of them and do everything by myself, so I counted with strong team values inside SumUp as proactivity, team first and mainly no silos, that means I could count with every single person to define, create and maintain tests and quality in our product.
We share the responsibility of testing our application, there are no gatekeepers in our team and everyone can contribute to the quality building, we live the Agile Testing Manifesto and the Modern Testing Principles.
To help us define where we should put the most efforts to find the main points where quality was needed we used techniques and exercises, like RiskStorming. I conduced monthly RiskStormings sessions with people containing the main skills of the team: research, design, development, quality, and business, a gamified exercise that focuses on identifying how to test risks that impact the imperative quality aspects of your product.
But also, is not just delivering a working feature but delivering the right feature at the right moment. A great part of the quality we are reaching is not related to which tests we are running, but how fast we can, within certain parameters of quality, deliver new features to our customers and get their feedback, so we can learn, improve, and grow blazing fast!
At the very end, quality is the resulting impact on the final user from researching, planning, developing, testing, delivering, monitoring, and retro-feeding. When we apply this mix together with strong team principles and exceptional people the result is an awesome product as SumUp Bank.
