Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering

How Testers Impact Developer Experience - Martijn Goossens

Listen Later
Four DORA metrics, one clear path for QA

📘 Free e-book: The 7 success factors of software testing. 25 years of project experience in one 33-page workbook, now also in English 👉 Get it for free

"If you only rely on very slow UI tests, you can do parallel testing all you want, but it's never going to be as fast without a test environment spinning up then all the unit tests that you could have written and run in that same time." - Martijn Goossens

In this episode, I talk with Martijn Goossens about DevEx, DORA, and how we put the Q into developer experience. We walk through the four DORA metrics and where testers make real impact with CI, smart coverage, and fast feedback. Martijn shares a simple fix that unlocked speed: give each team a test environment. We explore coaching with small experiments, clear metrics, and regular check ins. Start with the State of DevOps report. Map your QA work to these metrics. Speak value, stay visible, and grow with your team and community.

Martijn Goossens has over 20 years of experience in the QA field. He started as an Agile QA automation engineer and has fulfilled various QA leadership roles for the past 8 years. Martijn is ISTQB and TMAP certified and is a frequent participant in QA meetups and conferences. In recent years he found the international conference stages where he is keen to share his experiences from the trenches.

Highlights:

  • Change failure rate is the DORA metric most directly tied to QA work, because finding failures before production is the core of what testers do.
  • A slow or shared test environment blocks all four DORA metrics at once; giving each developer an isolated personal test environment resolves bottlenecks in change lead time, deployment frequency, and mean time to recovery.
  • Metrics without context are just numbers: an acceptable failure rate or deployment frequency depends on the risk profile and business priorities of the specific company, not on an industry standard.
  • Introducing changes as low-friction experiments with a fixed review window makes teams willing to try them, because a failed experiment carries no stigma and is simply replaced by the next one.
  • QA professionals who learn to express their work in DORA terms can make their contribution visible to product owners and business stakeholders who already speak that language.

    • More Links with Insights:

    • Martijns Website
      • ...more
      View all episodesView all episodes
      Download on the App Store
      Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality EngineeringBy Richard Seidl | Software Development & Testing Expert