スピーカー

Liliia Abdulina is Head of QA in the Kotlin Ecosystem Department at JetBrains, leading quality assurance for Kotlin language and its ecosystem. With 12+ years in IT, she works at the intersection of engineering quality, release stability, and team leadership, shaping QA strategy for the Kotlin compiler, tooling, integrations, and user-facing reliability. Liliia is a careful team leads’ mentor and an active speaker who shares practical insights on quality in large-scale language and software engineering tooling development.

Influence without authority: leading quality when you don’t own the roadmap

QA leaders are accountable for confidence or, simply put, for “making the quality good.” But they rarely control the roadmap, deadlines, or architecture, and they have no say in developers’ motivation mechanisms, so influence becomes their main lever.

In her transition from individual contributor to Head of QA on a large Kotlin Ecosystem codebase, Liliia started in “catch-up” mode: coverage gaps everywhere, QA staffed late, and quality conversations happening only at the end. The team fought to reach baseline coverage across the compiler, build tools, and a growing tool ecosystem, while she was iteratively reasoning about headcount. Then, over the next couple of years, they invested in sustainable quality — clear responsibility areas (automation, performance, exploratory), repeatable regression handling, and trust with engineering. A real test came when a new project appeared: for the first time, she proposed QA capacity and a stabilization budget up front, and a project lead asked, “Why exactly those numbers?” Instead of defending estimates, she explained options and consequences: how risk shifts when you go bigger or smaller, what becomes predictable, and what “done” means.

So why exactly those numbers, and how do you talk to stakeholders so they’ll hear you? Liliia will share how this quality narrative scaled as the team grew from 5 to 38 and moved quality issues off users’ list of top pain points. Attendees will leave with a simple narrative structure and language to lead quality without formal authority.