Making the Most of Your Testing Resources

Because testing is so low-profile at the top of the food chain, many people regard it as another expense center. If companies tighten their belts, testing organizations will have to do more with less (or less). However, most QA teams and others need to be more staffed and able to meet business objectives. So, how are they going to do the task now? 

The solution is straightforward. We must consider how to do things more effectively to accomplish more (and better) with what we have. Then, we must go further than our walls to see if new technology and tool developments may enable these changes. 

Test Managers, Start Managing Now!

Some things in life are immutable. For example, we will only live to reach 120 years old. It is possible but extremely unlikely. Another guarantee is that testing will be squeezed into the schedule.

It is doubtful that you will be given enough time for testing and a suitable position on the project's list of priorities. 

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Testers

The seven habits are discussed in this article, which frames them for very successful testers. These are the seven habits:

  1. Be Proactive
  2. Begin With the End in Mind
  3. Put First Things First
  4. Think Win/Win
  5. Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
  6. Synergize
  7. Sharpen the Saw

Be Proactive

In every software project, a tester's objective is to guarantee that a high-quality product is produced. You have two options when determining what went wrong with software projects that fail due to low quality: you can either be proactive or reactive. Reactive persons tend to attribute difficulties or barriers to other people and external factors. Being proactive will allow you to accept responsibility for the mistakes and come up with solutions for future initiatives. After a project is over, your team should do a "postmortem" or "retrospective" in which you candidly discuss the project's successes and failures. Here are three suggestions for approaching upcoming undertakings with initiative:

Making the Switch to Agile Testing

Sometimes, test teams may be perplexed about how to switch to agile. If you work on such a team, you almost certainly have manual regression tests, both because you’ve never had the time to automate them or because you test from the UI, and it does not make logical sense to automate them. You most likely have excellent exploratory testers who can uncover defects within complicated systems, but they do not automate their testing and require a finished product before they begin testing. You understand how to schedule testing for a release, but everything must be completed within a two-, three- or four-week iteration. How do you pull it off? How do you stay up with technological advancements?

This is a persistent challenge. In many businesses, developers believe they have moved to agile, but testers remain buried in manual testing and cannot “stay current” after each iteration. When I communicate to these professionals that they are only experiencing a portion of the benefits of their agile transformation, developers and testers say that the testers are too sluggish.

How Continuous Testing Can Improve DevOps Efficiency

What Is DevOps?

The best way for businesses to accelerate the pace, efficiency, and quality of their development pipeline is through DevOps. DevOps has an outstanding track record because it significantly changes how engineering teams work together to develop, test, and produce software. DevOps is broad and inclusive, encompassing the use of new frameworks and development practices and a complete philosophy and way of thinking that motivates various implementations throughout our industry.

“DevOps is a methodology in the software development and IT industry. Used as a set of practices and tools, DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle. DevOps is complementary to agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the agile way of working.” – from Wikipedia