Test management guide? “Communicate with the test lead or manager to allow testers to be involved in the decision-making meetings. Giving testers access to early knowledge will allow them to prepare early test environments. This will avoid any unforeseen issues, preventing any delays or risks while also being cost-effective.” Use tools to make testing easy. “Most technical leads will be familiar with the challenge of getting developers into the habit of making code testable. Therefore, top of your list of objectives should be ‘ease of use.’ Tests should be easy to write, and more importantly, trivially easy to run, by your development team. Ideally, all developers should be able to run all tests, in a single click, right from in their IDE. No excuses!”
Following on from getting your A-Team together, you now need to get them involved in every which way you can. Get team members involved in documenting the process, in the decision making for your projects, and encourage actively speaking up when they see problems or issues. Keeping the communication lines open with honest and frank discussion, and group involvement, is always going to be better than a dictatorship! Waterfall, Agile, Exploratory, Context-Driven… the list goes on. You need to decide – hopefully as a team – which methodology and which practices of that methodology fit your organisation.
The ultimate ebook for more than software testing basics: How would you like to have all the software testing knowledge you need in one comprehensive book? Whether you want to level up in the software test management field, or gain useful knowledge of the sector as a whole, A Test Manager’s Guide is the resource for you. As a young graduate I started looking for potential career opportunities and this eBook has shown me the beauty and complexity of the Test Manager profession from a theoretical standpoint. See even more details at Test Manager Ebook.
Develop rules of thumb – and document them. As testers, we often use rules of thumb throughout a project. For example, we sometimes use a total number of expected defects during test planning and then compare actual defects per hour found versus what we would expect, during test execution. Each of these rules of thumb aids us in managing the information we deal with as testers and QA managers. It would be nice (and useful) to have a collection of these rules of thumb in one place, each documented with examples. Conduct code reviews. Four eyes see more than two. That’s why you should let other developers review your source code on a regular basis. Pair programming, on the other hand, a technique where two developers write code together for longer periods, isn’t for everyone and is often not needed. But complicated, important or security related code greatly benefits from code reviews and will improve your code quality a lot.
Quarantine software testing advice of the day : With people working remotely, the overall environment will be less efficient, and/or collaborative. So it necessarily means that certain tasks may be less efficient and other task may be more efficient. When working from home, developers will have more time to code without being interrupted in meetings, but will have less time to clarify requirements, ask questions or hear what other team members are doing on the code that might help them (see tip 8 about requirements clarity). So now is a good time to shift to tasks that previously you didn’t have time for. Instead of doing some complex scenario tests that require you to talk to three other people, maybe it’s time to get some robust non-flaky regression tests in place. Use automation tools to improve both your automated testing and/or tasks in your DevOps pipeline. That tricky deployment process that has 5 manual steps that you have had on your personal to-do list for months? Maybe now is the time to write the code to automate it. Find a few more info on cania-consulting.com.