Testing, Quality & Reliability Topics
Quality assurance, testing methodologies, test automation, and reliability engineering. Includes QA frameworks, accessibility testing, quality metrics, and incident response from a reliability/engineering perspective. Covers testing strategies, risk-based testing, test case development, UAT, and quality transformations. Excludes operational incident management at scale (see 'Enterprise Operations & Incident Management').
Operational Quality and Standards
Addresses maintaining high standards for operational quality and customer experience. Topics include defining quality criteria, building assurance and control processes, setting and enforcing standard operating procedures, conducting audits and training, measuring quality metrics and trends, and driving continuous improvement. Candidates should show examples of advocating for appropriate rigor, preventing shortcuts that harm outcomes, and quantifying improvements in quality and customer satisfaction.
Root Cause Analysis and Diagnostics
Systematic methods, mindset, and techniques for moving beyond surface symptoms to identify and validate the underlying causes of business, product, operational, or support problems. Candidates should demonstrate structured diagnostic thinking including hypothesis generation, forming mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive hypothesis sets, prioritizing and sequencing investigative steps, and avoiding premature solutions. Common techniques and analyses include the five whys, fishbone diagramming, fault tree analysis, cohort slicing, funnel and customer journey analysis, time series decomposition, and other data driven slicing strategies. Emphasize distinguishing correlation from causation, identifying confounders and selection bias, instrumenting and selecting appropriate cohorts and metrics, and designing analyses or experiments to test and validate root cause hypotheses. Candidates should be able to translate observed metric changes into testable hypotheses, propose prioritized and actionable remediation steps with tradeoff considerations, and define how to measure remediation impact. At senior levels, expect mentoring others on rigorous diagnostic workflows and helping to establish organizational processes and guardrails to avoid common analytic mistakes and ensure reproducible investigations.
Service Level Agreements and Management
Covers the end to end practice of defining, negotiating, operating, monitoring, and improving formal service level agreements and related internal service level objectives. Candidates should be able to translate customer and business requirements into measurable commitments such as response time, resolution time, system availability, and quality targets; write clear and testable agreement clauses; and negotiate realistic targets with customers and internal stakeholders. Topics include methods for measuring and monitoring adherence using instrumentation, metrics, dashboards, real time monitoring, and trend reporting; alerting and escalation procedures; forecasting capacity and staffing to prevent breaches; incident remediation plans when targets are not met; and communication strategies for informing customers and internal teams when commitments are at risk or have been violated. Also assess understanding of the operational impact of service level targets on team prioritization and resourcing, trade offs between meeting time based metrics and ensuring quality outcomes, interactions between external service level agreements and internal service level objectives, and continuous improvement practices to reduce breaches and improve reliability.