Qe on Og Maciel's Journal

Just What Is A Quality Engineer? Part 2

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The last time I wrote about Quality Engineering, I mentioned that some of the reasons why people are not familiar with this term are, in no particular order:

'Quality' is usually something that is added as an after thought and doesn't really come into the picture, if ever, until the very end of the release process
Nobody outside of a QA team really knows what they do. It has something to do with testing...
Engineering is usually identified with skills related to writing code and designing algorithms, usually by a developer and not by QA

A quick search on Google shows the following results:

Just What Is A Quality Engineer? Part 1

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever I meet someone for the first time, after we get past the initial niceties typically involved when you meet someone for the first time, eventually the conversation shifts to work and what one does for a living. Inevitably I'm faced with what, at a first glance, may sound like a simple question and the conversation goes like this:

New acquaintance: "What do you do at Red Hat?"
Me: "I manage a team of quality engineers for a couple of different products."
New acquaintance: "Oh, you mean quality assurance, right? QA?"
Me: "No, quality engineers. QE."

What usually followed then was a lengthy monologue whereby I spent usually around ten to fifteen minutes explaining what the difference between QA and QE is and what, in my opinion, sets these two professions apart. Now, before I get too deep into this topic, I have to add a disclaimer here so not to give folks the impression that what I'm talking about is backed by any official definition or some type of professional trade organization! The following are my own definitions and conclusions, none of which were pulled out of thin air, but backed by (so far) 10 years of experience working on the field of delivering quality products. If there are formal definitions out there, and they match with my own, it is by pure coincidence.

FauxFactory 0.3.0

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Took some time from my vacation and released FauxFactory 0.3.0 to make it Python 3 compatible and to add a new generate_utf8 method (plus some nice tweaks and code clean up).

As always, the package is available on Pypi and can be installed via pip install fauxfactory.

If you have any constructive feedback, suggestions, or file a bug report or feature request, please use the Github page.

FauxFactory 0.2.1

Fri, 09 May 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Short on its heels, today I'm releasing FauxFactory 0.2.1 to fix a brown paper bag bug I encountered last night before going to bed.

Basically, the new "Lorem Ipsum" generator was not honoring the words parameter if you asked for a string longer than 70 characters. I have fixed the issue as well as added a new test to make sure that the generator does the right thing.

The package is available on Pypi (sadly the page is still not rendering correctly... suggestions welcome) and can be installed via pip install fauxfactory.

FauxFactory 0.2.0

Thu, 08 May 2014 19:12:00 +0000

Today I'm releasing FauxFactory 0.2.0 with a new feature, a "Lorem Ipsum" generator. I confess that I did not look around for any existing implementation in python out there and just started writing code. My idea was to create a method that would:

Return a "Lorem Ipsum" string if I passed no arguments:

In [1]: from fauxfactory import FauxFactory

In [2]: FauxFactory.generate_iplum()
Out[2]: u'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit,
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut
enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi
ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in
reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla
pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in
culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.'

Return a single paragraph with a fixed number of words if I passed a numeric words=x argument. If words was a large number, the text would 'wrap around' as many times as needed: