One of the best ways to learn is to make mistakes. That’s probably true, but first you need to know there’s been a mistake. During my three years at SAP, I worked as a quality assurance developer. It’s not a very popular role. Like a bird of ill omen, I’d contact developers to give them more work, and they’d contact me when I’d missed a bug in my area. Thankless as it can be, the work is essential. More than features, it’s the absence of bugs or slowdowns that shapes how people perceive an application’s quality.

Quality assurance isn’t just about writing tests and reporting bugs. A key part is being able to communicate problems properly, or the absence of them. That takes two things: an interface that shows the results relevant to the person looking at them, and results produced regularly. That second part generally comes through a continuous integration and deployment pipeline.

I had the chance to work on all these aspects over those three years, and it fundamentally changed the way I build software. Because I’ve never stopped wearing that tester’s hat, and it still helps me in every project I work on.