Testing Blog
What Test Engineers do at Google
Monday, September 12, 2016
by Matt Lowrie, Manjusha Parvathaneni, Benjamin Pick, and Jochen Wuttke
Test engineers (TEs) at Google are a dedicated group of engineers who use proven testing practices to foster excellence in our products. We orchestrate the rapid testing and releasing of products and features our users rely on. Achieving this velocity requires creative and diverse engineering skills that allow us to advocate for our users. By building testable user journeys into the process, we ensure reliable products. TEs are also the glue that bring together feature stakeholders (product managers, development teams, UX designers, release engineers, beta testers, end users, etc.) to confirm successful product launches. Essentially, every day we ask ourselves, “How can we make our software development process more efficient to deliver products that make our users happy?”.
The TE role grew out of the desire to make Google’s early free products, like Search, Gmail and Docs, better than similar paid products on the market at the time. Early on in Google’s history, a small group of engineers believed that the company’s “launch and iterate” approach to software deployment could be improved with continuous automated testing. They took it upon themselves to promote good testing practices to every team throughout the company, via some programs you may have heard about:
Testing on the Toilet
, the
Test Certified Program
, and the
Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC)
. These efforts resulted in every project taking ownership of all aspects of testing, such as
code coverage
and
performance testing
. Testing practices quickly became commonplace throughout the company and engineers writing tests for their own code became the standard. Today, TEs carry on this tradition of setting the standard of quality which all products should achieve.
Historically, Google has sustained two separate job titles related to product testing and test infrastructure, which has caused confusion. We often get asked what the difference is between the two. The rebranding of the Software engineer, tools and infrastructure (SETI) role, which now concentrates on engineering productivity, has been addressed in a
previous blog post
. What this means for test engineers at Google, is an enhanced responsibility of being the authority on product excellence. We are expected to uphold testing standards company-wide, both programmatically and persuasively.
Test engineer is a unique role at Google. As TEs, we define and organize our own engineering projects, bridging gaps between engineering output and end-user satisfaction. To give you an idea of what TEs do, here are some examples of challenges we need to solve on any particular day:
Automate a manual verification process for product release candidates so developers have more time to respond to potential release-blocking issues.
Design and implement an automated way to track and surface Android battery usage to developers, so that they know immediately when a new feature will cause users drained batteries.
Quantify if a regenerated data set used by a product, which contains a billion entities, is better quality than the data set currently live in production.
Write an automated test suite that validates if content presented to a user is of an acceptable quality level based on their interests.
Read an engineering design proposal for a new feature and provide suggestions about how and where to build in testability.
Investigate correlated stack traces submitted by users through our feedback tracking system, and search the code base to find the correct owner for escalation.
Collaborate on determining the root cause of a production outage, then pinpoint tests that need to be added to prevent similar outages in the future.
Organize a task force to advise teams across the company about best practices when testing for accessibility.
Over the next few weeks leading up to
GTAC
, we will also post vignettes of actual TEs working on different projects at Google, to showcase the diversity of the Google Test Engineer role. Stay tuned!
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