QA in the Bay: Balancing Quality and Speed We had a full house last night at QA in the Bay, our regular meetup for software developers and QA professionals. This meetup featured — in addition to free pizza, beer, and video games — an in-depth discussion of how best to balance quality and development speed, a problem uniquely challenging to mobile teams. Testlio CEO and co-founder Kristel Kruustük alongside Ken Toley and Greg Davis, quality leaders at Dictionary.com and Salesforce respectively, led a discussion about the need to have both a quality mindset and a “ship it” mindset on important projects. From left: Ken, Greg, and Kristel. “In the last year we eliminated our quality department,” said Greg. “But we didn’t eliminate quality. We’re building automated tests for most of our customers’ needs.” Although the conversation inevitably touched on automated testing, panelists stressed the continuing importance of manual testers capable of going beyond what scripts can provide. “QA is an expert user,” Ken said. “What you really want is a five-star rating in the App Store,” Greg said. “And that requires manual testers.” Thanks to everyone who came out! There were plenty of video games at QA in the Bay. Did we mention the pizza and beer?