Full-stack is a term that I have heard used mostly with developers and over the years I have joked about the development of "full-stack testers" (I recall Mark Tomlinson having a spirited debate on that term some years back ;) ). Still, that is the core point of Christina's talk so what does it mean?
My first question is "do we want this to be in one person, or are we talking about the full stack being in the team as a whole?" Is it realistic to have a full stack tester? Can any tester know everything from top to bottom? Or are we looking at full-stack testing meaning any tester or the team of testers can attack any given testing challenge?
As Christina points out in her abstract, there are several areas and types when it comes to Quality Assurance
Testing
Test Automation
Performance
CI/CD/CT
Usability
Accessibility
to be frank this is an interesting and exciting prospect. It reminds me that I should probably review Alaister Scott's "Pride and Paradev" as that was one of his goals, to help encourage testers to branch out and become broader jacks of all trades. Basically, it comes down to any tester being able to tackle any testing challenge anywhere up and down the development stack. It is unlikely one tester is going to be able to completely cover everything out of the gate. However, it's a good bet if you have a team of three to six testers, you may well have one full-stack tester combined. From there, make a commitment to developing the team to spread that knowledge so that everyone can be competitive. Of course, the odds of getting all six team members to be equal across the board for all skills is probably not reasonable but it's a great goal to reach for. My guess is, even if you don't completely make it, there's a great chance the team will be far more formidable than they were previously :).
Accessibility
to be frank this is an interesting and exciting prospect. It reminds me that I should probably review Alaister Scott's "Pride and Paradev" as that was one of his goals, to help encourage testers to branch out and become broader jacks of all trades. Basically, it comes down to any tester being able to tackle any testing challenge anywhere up and down the development stack. It is unlikely one tester is going to be able to completely cover everything out of the gate. However, it's a good bet if you have a team of three to six testers, you may well have one full-stack tester combined. From there, make a commitment to developing the team to spread that knowledge so that everyone can be competitive. Of course, the odds of getting all six team members to be equal across the board for all skills is probably not reasonable but it's a great goal to reach for. My guess is, even if you don't completely make it, there's a great chance the team will be far more formidable than they were previously :).
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