Engineering Alpha in Private Equity
Aug 5, 2026 · 45 min · 9 segments
Paul and Dave sit down with tech veteran and quality pioneer Elisabeth Hendrickson (former VP of R&D for Data Products at Pivotal). Together, they shatter one of the most common metrics used in…
Elisabeth HendricksonGuest
Dave MangotHost
Paul KarnerHost
I mean, my take on it is quality assurance is, so first of all, heavily influenced by working at Salesforce, which had a very mature quality practice, let's call it.
Uh, and so, you know, based on, like, Jez and Dave's book, like, continuous delivery and there's all these things that we try to do to reduce the risk of delivering software and, you know, how much testing and things that we would do is going to affect how much risk we're willing to tolerate.
And famously in my Salesforce career, uh, some executive vice president asked me, like, "Well, how confident can we be in this software when it's released?" And I said, "How much do you wanna spend?" Because, you know, we could do three seconds of testing and we would have a lot less confidence than [laughs] if we were to do more than that.
Um, so I kinda make this distinction between quality assurance as sort of this old school idea that I'm going to manually poke at things and, like, follow maybe some script or whatever, but it's, it's sort of a very, you know, exploratory testing all the time kind of idea, versus quality engineering, which is going to have my CICD pipelines, my automated tests, my automated load tests, security tests, integration tests, all these things which in a very engineer way of looking at this kind of stuff, as opposed to just people who poke.
Like, AI develops software at 10 times the speed and then I give it to someone to poke at, that [laughs] is gonna be a problem.
I remember you reached out to me, I don't know, a few years ago, three years ago, something like that.
And you said something about, "What do you have on, on modern quality engineering practices?" And inside, what you may or may not know, is how much I died a little bit.
Because back in the, like, 1990s, there were people who would make these huge distinctions between well that's not actually quality engineering, that's quality assurance, or that's not...
I mean, my take on it is quality assurance is, so first of all, heavily influenced by working at Salesforce, which had a very mature quality practice, let's call it.
Uh, and so, you know, based on, like, Jez and Dave's book, like, continuous delivery and there's all these things that we try to do to reduce the risk of delivering software and, you know, how much testing and things that we would do is going to affect how much risk we're willing to tolerate.
And famously in my Salesforce career, uh, some executive vice president asked me, like, "Well, how confident can we be in this software when it's released?" And I said, "How much do you wanna spend?" Because, you know, we could do three seconds of testing and we would have a lot less confidence than [laughs] if we were to do more than that.
Um, so I kinda make this distinction between quality assurance as sort of this old school idea that I'm going to manually poke at things and, like, follow maybe some script or whatever, but it's, it's sort of a very, you know, exploratory testing all the time kind of idea, versus quality engineering, which is going to have my CICD pipelines, my automated tests, my automated load tests, security tests, integration tests, all these things which in a very engineer way of looking at this kind of stuff, as opposed to just people who poke.
Like, AI develops software at 10 times the speed and then I give it to someone to poke at, that [laughs] is gonna be a problem.
I remember you reached out to me, I don't know, a few years ago, three years ago, something like that.
And you said something about, "What do you have on, on modern quality engineering practices?" And inside, what you may or may not know, is how much I died a little bit.
Because back in the, like, 1990s, there were people who would make these huge distinctions between well that's not actually quality engineering, that's quality assurance, or that's not...
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