30 Days of Testing – We Aren’t the Only Ones

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.

What kind of testing do others on the team do?  Sure we as testers are tasked with the testing, but we know that others test and in fact, we actively work on helping other improve their testing.  What testing do others do?

We’ve actually had some discussions on our team recently on this in terms of how do we all communicate with each other about what testing has been done.  The developers do some testing of their code, both via adding or running unit tests and by running integration tests against new changes. Developers and product owners also do additional interactive testing at times and others, like our customer engagement team, also use and test the product.  With so many different people testing the product, how do we coordinate the testing so that we are being efficient? This falls into our test management strategy and so we use things like simple shared spreadsheets, that can track at a very basic level, some of the things that have been done.

We also do group testing sessions where we can help and observe each other testing. This helps to teach those with less testing experience on things they can do to improve their testing and also helps us generate new testing ideas. The more collaboration we have with other members of the team, the more testing we can see being done in various ways and areas.  Developers do a lot of testing.  Product owners do a lot of testing. Documentation writers do a lot of testing.  Many people are testing our products and that is a wonderful thing.  As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about good testing and how to be effective at it, I can help and encourage this.  Quality is a team sport!