Note that this post is part of a series where I am ‘live blogging’ my way through the ministry of testing’s 30 days of Agile Testing challenge.
Yesterday’s challenge asked how I could make my job easier and today’s asks how I can make my team’s job easier. I’m going to cheat and use yesterday’s answer today – Automate.
Well, only a partial cheat, because there are actually two teams I want to talk about. For the first team – my testing team – I think the ‘automate’ answer sums it up well. There are things I can do (and am currently looking into) that I hope will help the team get better at understanding our tests. The fact is that many of the things I automate for my own purposes can be shared with other testers and help them out as well, and so when it comes to the testing team, I can probably help them out with my scripting skills.
When I think of my other team – the development team I’m embedded with – my primary skill set isn’t to automate things. Everyone else on the team writes code far more often than I do and they are well able to automate the things they need to. The ways that I help this team have little to do with creating scripts, and more to do with reducing friction in our processes. I want to reduce the number of steps and the amount of time it takes to get code into the main branch. I want to reduce the friction around running tests. I want to be able to give more rapid and timely feedback. Along with building a stronger team spirit across development and testing, smoothing out our processes is one of the primary ways I can make life easier for this team.
offbeattesting 