Summary
Matt Kuntz leads our quality assurance and testing. He explains the difference between quality assurance and testing, highlighting that testing is a function of quality assurance. Matt also mentions the importance of quality assurance in the medical device industry. He discusses the composition of the QA and testing staff, as well as the balance between automated and manual testing. The impact of different methodologies, such as Agile, on QA and testing is also explored. Matt emphasizes the need for expertise in different industries and the challenges of security testing. He concludes by discussing the benefits of being unfamiliar with an industry when approaching QA testing.

Takeaways
• Quality assurance is the overall process of building something, while testing ensures that it is working as it should.
• QA and testing are not limited to software and can also include hardware and device testing.
• The majority of QA professionals perform both manual and automated testing.
• Agile methodologies have become popular in QA and testing as they allow for faster testing and bug detection.
• QA and testing professionals need to adapt quickly to different industries and software systems.
• Security testing and performance testing are important components of QA and testing.
• Balancing speed and performance with security is a challenge in application development.
• QA and testing professionals should consider security and performance in their testing plans.
• Having some ignorance or lack of industry knowledge can be beneficial in asking critical questions and avoiding assumptions in QA testing.

Autogenerated Transcript:
Kelly Wendlandt (00:00.59)
2, 1, you are live with the Vodcast. We have Mr. Matt Kuntz on this morning. Matt, how are you?

Matt Kuntz (00:07.866)
I’m well, thank you. And you, Kelly? Happy Friday.

Kelly Wendlandt (00:10.862)
Happy Friday. That beard is approaching what I think my son would call epic.

Matt Kuntz (00:16.698)
Well, it used to be better. Now it’s trim. Yeah.

Kelly Wendlandt (00:18.894)
Really? Well, yeah, I remember it was longer, right?

Matt Kuntz (00:24.73)
It was. My wife wanted it off.

Kelly Wendlandt (00:26.35)
How much longer? How much longer? Was it six inches longer?

Matt Kuntz (00:30.97)
That would be my COVID beard, so could have been much longer.

Kelly Wendlandt (00:34.414)
If we had some real technology involved on my side, I would be able to juxtapose the two pictures. That would have been ideal. Yeah, next time I’ll have all kinds of a crack staff in the background that can quickly get pictures. You’re not known as someone that spends a lot of time posting your image on the internet, so it might be hard to actually find that.

Matt Kuntz (00:42.168)
Yeah.

next time.

Matt Kuntz (00:50.426)
Love it.

Matt Kuntz (00:57.434)
They’ll always stay away from it, so this is uncomfortable already.

Kelly Wendlandt (01:02.01)
So Matt, you lead our quality assurance and testing group. And I wonder, is testing only associated with software? So when I tell people that, should I be saying the software testing group or do you guys test? What is the QA versus the testing?

Matt Kuntz (01:10.106)
I do.

Matt Kuntz (01:28.282)
Well, very good question. So now it doesn’t include software, it can include hardware or device testing. As we get into the medical device industry, some people are testing the actual device and the hardware and the firmware that’s on it that may be related to the software itself. So the difference between quality assurance and testing, testing is a function of quality assurance.

I like to say simply that quality assurance is the overall processes and how you build something and testing is to ensure that it’s working as it should. If that makes sense.

Kelly Wendlandt (02:05.614)
Yeah, it does. It does. And so the quality assurance is more, the testing is going to be more on the software side. The quality assurance is going to be medical device, different hardware.

Matt Kuntz (02:15.866)
Well, the quality assurance would be the process of how you build. Like if you think about capturing requirements, how your information communication flows from team members. When you get a defect, how do you respond to it? How do you approve requirements, review them? The testing is making sure that it’s working as it should or isn’t doing what it’s not supposed to be doing.

Kelly Wendlandt (02:43.342)
You mentioned the medical device. Is that something we’ve done before? Do we go in and work with companies on their quality assurance for medical devices?

Matt Kuntz (02:53.146)
Yeah, you know, we used to spend some time at Boston. Well, we do spend some time with Boston Scientific. I don’t know precisely if we’re doing any medical device testing there. Personally, I’ve done some at Medtronic being involved in projects there with device testing. You know, think of POS systems, point of sale systems, something like Target, that’s spy, that they’re using scanning devices to read.

Read codes for pricing or product information. We’ve done testing on that, or I personally have myself. Just scanning codes and making sure that the data is getting pulled correctly or scanned correctly.

Kelly Wendlandt (03:35.278)
Okay.

How many people on our staff are QA people versus testing people and does it break out by automated testing versus manual testing?

Matt Kuntz (03:49.722)
Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, I would think that everyone on my team is a quality assurance professional means that we’re trying to adhere to standards. And there is also testing components that go along with that. So, you know, quality drives everything that we do. Example, your headphones that you have on there. Someone had to design those. There’s probably design specs that are followed.

You know, you plug it in, there’s a jack that standardized, that’s a quality design process. Now testing them to make sure that they work with all types of plug -in outlets, computers would be a testing function. So I would say the majority of the team is doing, well, they’re all doing some component of testing, but they’re all concerned with quality, the overall quality of a product or quality of their service.

if that makes any sense. From an automation standpoint, you know, it’s probably 50 -50. People are doing manual testing and doing some sort of automation. You know, there’s a misconception in the industry that you’re either automated or you’re manual, and that’s not necessarily the case. You gotta make sure that things work generally before you can automate it. So, regardless of…

Kelly Wendlandt (04:49.198)
It does, yeah.

Matt Kuntz (05:14.068)
automation or no automation, you’re still walking through the process of doing the manual testing to make sure it works first.

Kelly Wendlandt (05:21.326)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How much does the methodology, you know, over the last 10 years or seven years we’ve seen a lot of people talk about agile, different methodologies that are coming into environments to try to improve the overall quality of many different processes. How does that impact quality assurance and testing that you do?

Matt Kuntz (05:47.098)
Yeah, I think I’ll speak on behalf of most of the consultants out there. They probably prefer the agile methodology just because requirements are getting to them sooner. They’re able to test it sooner. They’re able to turn around and find bugs or defects sooner. Retest that and make sure it’s working. So it’s, it’s chunked up in components or it could be an Epic or it could be features or stories that are associated with different deliverables that you get at real time instead of the old.

Waterfall methodology that spend six months on requirements, either review them, approve them, you’d build them out and then they might be out of date. So you’d have to restart defining some of those requirements. You know, there are certain projects or certain, probably industries that can still align with Agile or Waterfall, but most of them have been moving to an Agile SDLC.

Kelly Wendlandt (06:46.734)
Okay. Are there particular industries that the software group is experts in? Does that matter in your opinion or?

Matt Kuntz (06:56.25)
SDLC no, you know, I would say if you’re testing if you’re a tester you’re gonna go into an environment Where you might be familiar with software you might not be you have to learn it You have to learn the requirements how they’re gonna use it. So It’s always always new for a tester. I think there are They can adjust quickly. I that’s the beauty of being a tester or quality assurance professional You’re gonna go into different environments. You’re gonna

look at different software, different integration touch points, and you’re to have to learn how it’s working. So when we get these requests that they have to have expertise in a system, yeah, that helps get you up to speed, but drilling down into the requirements is going to be the key, and that’s where the expertise comes in, where you can look at it, look at the definition of it, put scenarios around it, making sure that it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, and equally important.

Kelly Wendlandt (07:43.95)
Okay.

Matt Kuntz (07:54.074)
making sure that it’s not doing what it’s not supposed to be doing. We see that where someone might test something, oh, yep, it works, but did you try this scenario, this scenario, this scenario? No, I didn’t try it, but it works. And then you get users’ hands on it and they try to break it and do unique scenarios with it, and that’s where sometimes we run into issues. I think there was a, with the security testing too, that becomes a different piece.

In the industry, it sounds like there was some news breaking that one of our local firms had some security problems. So. Yeah.

Kelly Wendlandt (08:28.27)
I’ve heard that rumor that, yeah. Does the world of consistent security threats change what QA testers are expected to know and anticipate and test for in today’s world?

Matt Kuntz (08:46.746)
Yeah, in some cases, you know, there there’s different tools out in the industry that allow us to do some penetration testing. There are security tools that allow you to test certain parameters of that. You know, not all the testers are expertise in that. You know, some of them go into an assignment or a work culture where they’re looking at functionality or integration or database testing in the back end where you’re looking at ETL testing.

specifically in just handling the data movement behind the scenes. So I would say it’s more of a specialized skill to do security and penetration testing to make sure applications are made whole and it can’t be breached. And sometimes it’s an afterthought. Companies think, well, we’ll never get attacked. And then, well, you look back and say, whoops.

Kelly Wendlandt (09:38.99)
Yeah. Yeah, we’re getting attacked. Yeah, and it seems like it’s not consistent. You like you have this these diametrically opposed goals at some level within applications as speed, best performance, and then on the other side is someone saying it needs to be completely locked down and it needs to be bulletproof security wise. In those two things, I think are probably hard to get.

to come together and have both to have both of those. And so you’re balancing that I’m assuming as a QA as a QA person.

Matt Kuntz (10:13.242)
Yeah.

Matt Kuntz (10:16.954)
Well, I think you try to, you the, you touched on performance testing or, you know, outside of security testing, there’s, you want to make sure the application works as it should. So there’s functional testing, there’s integration testing, then you get into the security aspect of it. Then you get into the performance aspect of it too. Generally, you’ll see companies that want to build their application and then it’s time to market, right? Let’s get it out there. We think we’re good. And then the,

performance degradation happens and then make it a performance tester in there. You know, it really comes down to budget planning. What’s the best interest? How many people are going to use it? You know, not a lot of companies do. Performance testing as they should. You know, it’s usually an after fact. We have performance issues. We need to do some performance testing failover testing. Finding out where our systems breaking, but.

It’s really dependent on your users too.

Kelly Wendlandt (11:19.374)
Would you say that our group, if you’re hiring Logisolves testing group, we are going to be considering the security component within the testing and we are going to consider the performance testing within the application? Is that part of, if you’re bringing us in at a level where we’re to look at that, is that something we do?

Matt Kuntz (11:42.17)
Yeah, if you’re involved in the test planning process, you’re going to at least ask those questions and find out what our plan is around that and how we want to manage it.

You have to at least bring it up and every quality professional should be asking those questions. What is our plan around security testing, performance testing before we go live? But then again, we have existing applications out there that we help support in the industry. So multiple team members might get pulled into a team that needs additional staff to get some testing done, get it out the door.

Kelly Wendlandt (12:02.22)
Yeah.

Matt Kuntz (12:17.626)
It could be too far gone. Even if you do ask those questions, it may be irrelevant at that point where it’s time to market.

Kelly Wendlandt (12:25.198)
Yeah, you know, do you think do you think you have it is a QA tester better off not knowing anything about the industry? Sometimes I think that walking in and having no clue can be a benefit versus being an expert in the particular industry because you start to make assumptions and know things that that then get in the way of the the the perspective of.

look testing every little tiny component. Do you see that at all?

Matt Kuntz (12:56.89)
You know, I would agree with that to some degree. You know, as you get up to speed, I’m working on application now that is new to me. So there’s a learning curve that goes along with it. But having some ignorance is always good because you can ask the questions of why or how this is supposed to work. Why or how does this work? Should it work this way? You know, I always think of a little kid too. You’re around little kids and they ask questions that adults don’t even think of.

So it’s always good to have that ignorance to some degree going in instead of saying, I’m an expert at this, I know everything about it. You don’t until you know the environment, the culture and the people.

Kelly Wendlandt (13:35.886)
Yeah, very good. Well, Matt Kuntz, thank you so much for your time this morning. And for everyone else out there, you’re watching the Vodcast.

Matt Kuntz (13:46.362)
Have a great day.