Keeping software testing processes on track is an overarching goal every QA lead wants for their team. Yet, development projects aren’t always plain sailing.
No one wants unhappy clients, and, worse, overworked QA engineers and developers.
We all have to accept that activities don’t always stick to the initial planning. Requirements change near the final stages, feature requests are unclear to business values and little time is left to test critical areas.
This article gives you key evaluation points on Sprint Planning, tool selection, and quality reporting to help your team not dread the upcoming delivery date.
No Silos in Sprint Planning
Unlike in the Scrum methodology, process planning for software testing isn’t just for QA leads to decide. Clients, stakeholders, and the remaining members are required to partake in. Realistic requirements and effort prioritization are only possible with feedback from various roles and perspectives.
Say a feature request pops up. Project managers need to know whether or not it should be passed onto the development and QA team. For QA engineers, they could raise the lack of automation in place and manually-intensive work to verify the new functionality doesn’t break the old ones. As for developers, they could foresee the limited time for unit testing and risk delivering buggy codes to their QAs.
Overall, learn to set boundaries. It could be refusing to take meetings at lunchtime or turning down feature requests that double the effort for regression testing near the delivery date.
Working With Software Testing Technologies
Learning about the tech stack of competitors or top performers helps QA leads know about their options and the tried-and-true strategies. However, what drives the growth in one team won’t ensure the same for the other.
The nuts and bolts of every organization vary in size, expertise, and, of course, challenges. A Fortune 500 firm might have attained a much higher testing maturity than a start-up. Bigger firms had gone through the major trials to find what works or what doesn’t. For long-standing players, their engineers have fully implemented CI/CD and DevOps, where the priority now is just to streamline the workflow as a whole.
Newcomers will probably have it different. Organizations twist and turn, searching for the optimal way of doing QA without being fully dependent on developers. Such scenarios call for a solution that allows keywords/actions to be made using coding expertise, where unseasoned testers can easily reuse them to design cases quicker.
To become a QA lead that members love, one should acknowledge their team’s difficulties and offer a viable solution.
Read more: Best Practices for Test Automation Strategy
Reporting Testing Progress to Stakeholders
Software development projects are held up by various tools, making data collection for reports a real hassle. No leader wants to have a poorly depicted picture of quality to project stakeholders and management.
To move in Agile speed, gone are the days of spreadsheets and manually reaching out to members for numbers. Popular project management software like Jira and TestOps are widely used due to their integrations with the most popular testing, dev, and build tools.
Linking requirements, test cases, results, and defects to one another from the start simplifies traceability and avoids important pieces of information lost in chat threads.
Download Now: Getting Testing Done On-Time | 15 Questions for Agile QA Leads
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