9.10Hands-On Exercise
- Assess your current role: which activities from the gatekeeper model are you doing? Which from the coach model?
- Identify one upstream activity you could start doing this sprint (requirements review, PR review, three amigos)
- Propose one process change that would shift testing earlier in your team's workflow
- Track the "bugs found by phase" metric for your next 3 sprints. Is the distribution shifting left?
- Write a brief pitch for your manager explaining why QA should participate in sprint planning and code reviews
Interview Talking Point: "I see the QA role as a quality coach, not a gatekeeper. I participate in three amigos sessions to refine acceptance criteria before development starts, which prevents bugs rather than just finding them later. I ensure our Definition of Done includes concrete test criteria -- unit coverage, browser test evidence, and exploratory testing sign-off. I structure pipelines with fast feedback loops and quality gates so the team gets reliable signals on every change. In retrospectives, I bring quality metrics like escaped defects, flake rates, and test cycle time so we make data-driven improvements. I think about all four agile test quadrants -- not just the automated unit and integration tests, but also the exploratory testing, usability testing, and performance testing that give us a complete picture of quality. The measure of my success is not bugs found, but bugs prevented."