Any business that uses technology to interface with or provide service to their customers, suppliers, and partners requires customer-facing applications that have exceptional quality. The assurance of business outcomes must become an imperative for IT professionals.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, application performance was a differentiator in the market. But in today's competitive landscape, having a highly responsive and scalable application is a basic expectation. Performance no longer lives on the fringe of the quality world.

How can you know that your services will handle the requests of millions of users a day? Or that making a fundamental change to one of your technologies won’t break your user experience? The answer: By having your entire team use and build on a phased approach to testing the right pieces at the right time. The Pokémon Company International services group develops and updates the services used for logging into the Pokemon.com website and applications like Pokémon Go and Pokémon TV. Since the launch of Pokémon Go in 2016, their quality-focused team has worked to develop strategies that reduce the number and duration of customer issues in the face of millions of daily active users. Join Paul Grimes as he presents the phases their test engineers go through and the tools used to ensure that the services Pokémon is delivering are capable of meeting users' demands.

It can be easy to feel like the villain when you work in testing. After all, part of the job is to point out when things are broken, people have made mistakes, timelines aren't realistic, or a plan can't work. But if your team feels like you're a frequent naysayer, trust can and will erode.