Software Testing and Quality Assurance: Lessons from JD's Quality Team Transformation

JD demands the same level of trustworthiness, reliability, and stability from its software systems as it does from the products sold on its platform. With the growing complexity of micro‑service architectures, ensuring quality has become increasingly challenging, presenting both difficulties and opportunities for the testing team.

The JD quality team’s year‑end review in 2017 highlighted a significant improvement: testers evolved into test‑development engineers, gaining new skills and greater influence within development teams.

Target audience: software testing engineers and testers.

Software Testing

Quality is a collective responsibility of the whole team, not just the testers. Testing aims to uncover problems rather than prove their absence; it can reveal defects but cannot guarantee that all defects are found. Testing incurs cost, and the later the testing phase, the higher the cost of defect detection, so an optimal stopping point must be determined based on defect probability and reliability requirements. All testing must trace back to user requirements because the ultimate goal of software is to satisfy those needs.

1.1.1 What is Software Testing

In 1983, Bill Hetzel defined testing as any activity that evaluates a program or system’s attributes, serving as a measure of software quality. Subsequent ISO standards (ISO 9126, ISO 14598) refined the definition of software quality as the degree to which software meets stated or implied user needs, considering internal, external, and usage quality.

Educational texts distinguish testing from quality assurance: while testing engineers help improve quality, they do not produce it—developers are the primary producers of quality. Testing is one component of the broader quality‑assurance process.

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