7.10Hands-On Exercise

1. Plot the escaped defect rate for your team over the last 6 sprints. Is it converging toward zero, flat, or increasing?
2. Create a defect arrival curve for your current testing cycle. Does the curve suggest the product is stabilizing?
3. Build a bug burndown chart for your next release. Are you on track to resolve all critical and major bugs by the release date?
4. Identify 3 leading indicators that your team is not currently tracking. Propose how to collect them.
5. Run one metrics-driven improvement experiment: pick your worst metric, hypothesize a cause, implement a change, and measure the result after 3 sprints.

Interview Talking Point: "I approach test strategy as a risk-based discipline, not a checkbox exercise. I start by assessing business risk -- which features generate revenue, which affect the most users, which have the most complex integrations -- and I allocate testing effort proportionally. I structure the test suite to follow the test pyramid: heavy investment in fast unit tests, a strong integration layer for service boundaries, and a lean E2E suite focused on critical user journeys. I track metrics that drive decisions: defect escape rate tells me if we are catching bugs before customers; flaky test rate tells me if the pipeline is trustworthy; and risk-weighted coverage tells me if we are testing the right things. I use defect arrival curves to predict release readiness and bug burndowns to forecast whether we will close all critical issues by the target date. When metrics indicate a problem, I run structured improvement experiments -- for example, when our escaped defect rate was 12%, I introduced three amigos sessions for high-risk stories, and within 3 sprints the rate dropped to 6%. I build dashboards that serve different audiences: a real-time war room for the QA team, a sprint-level summary for engineering managers, and a traffic-light posture report for executives. My goal is to make quality visible, predictable, and continuously improving."