Have you heard people saying “Testing doesn’t provide much value to the organization”, “anybody can do Testing”, “Testing is a boring, repetitive job with no creativeness involved”, “hire some out of school kids to test applications” or “Testers are in reality ‘developer wannabees’, can really have an impact on your team’s morale.
There are so many misconceptions that are out there but actuality is-
Testing is a skilled activity that requires the ability to think, explore and follow logic while questioning and reasoning at the same time. Sorry, you just can’t take anybody off the street to do Testing. It takes a skilled, intelligent professional who understands the needs of the organization and is ready for the task!
Your applications are a critical company asset. Depending on the nature of your business, direct profit and revenue can be impacted if an application goes down or performs poorly. And of course, a company’s reputation can also be seriously damaged when things don’t “work” right. Think about it. Will you hire an inexperienced, out of college kid to take care of your critical investments and financial assets? If you answer yes, then I would say sure, go ahead and hire an out of school kid to test your applications.
While it is true that some Testing engineers like to get into the code, and enjoy using automated scripts, there are other folks that prefer a “thinking & building test cases while executing manual tests” type of approach.
Testers represents the heterogeneous users of the products that your company produces, so they are there to improve product quality, ensure a better user experience and reduce support costs. To top it all, QA teams assess product conformance to specifications and standards, while checking interoperability with infrastructure, complementary products and/or third party vendor products.
Well, this one could be partially true, depending on the internal processes that you have in place. For example, if Tester is not involved with a project from the beginning, there is not much room to bring new ideas or feedback to product’s requirements. And this could translate into lack of empowerment, and not feeling appreciated.
Here are few points which can be used to improve/motivate your testing team without increasing the budget-
- Take a look at internal atmosphere of organization and try to understand the internal atmosphere. And identify the areas which require improvement in terms of Process, Attitude or anything.
- Brag about your team to stakeholders and peers – Show off your team in front of the Customer/Client/Stakeholders and don’t let any chance to go for this.
- Improve relations with the development team - try building a personal relationship between Dev and testing, and try to understand the point of view from both when discussing issues. Frequent Team Building could be a good option to success it.
- Enhance your testing JD – A job description leaves an impression about the organization before any one actually joins. So that JD should be attractive and should leave a positive message about the Company
- Involve testing in your development cycles from the beginning – Identify and Try to get involve testers at the very beginning of projects and let the give opportunity with responsibilities to understand and make a hold on the whole project.
- Gaze the ways to automate – to be part of Automation Team is always a dream for a tester who is working in a Dev-Testing Project. Run a drive to identify the people who are skilled and can be fit for automation and let them research and discover the new tools and systems for their current projects/clients, and if there is success you can get a lot advantage by selling them to the customer.
- Consider rotating projects and responsibilities across team – anyone will be bored by doing the same/monotonous job after a significant time, to avoid this make it in practice to change the teams/responsibilities or project if feasible. Let them explore the different projects domains.
- Engage your team in customer interactions - If there is an interest within the team look for opportunities to engage your team in customer interactions (customer visits, demos, conference calls, booth duties at conferences, etc). It will translate into increased job satisfaction among your team, and more job security
