A test manager’s knowledge? “Communicate with the test lead or manager to allow testers to be involved in the decision-making meetings. Giving testers access to early knowledge will allow them to prepare early test environments. This will avoid any unforeseen issues, preventing any delays or risks while also being cost-effective.” Use tools to make testing easy. “Most technical leads will be familiar with the challenge of getting developers into the habit of making code testable. Therefore, top of your list of objectives should be ‘ease of use.’ Tests should be easy to write, and more importantly, trivially easy to run, by your development team. Ideally, all developers should be able to run all tests, in a single click, right from in their IDE. No excuses!”

There are a lot of great staff out there and typically with testers I find attitude is everything! Sure, you can learn great technical skills but if your team members don’t have the right attitude or intuition for testing you will probably be out of luck. If you are lucky enough to have great Test Leads or Testers you will probably find they have the right attitude and social skills to deal diplomatically with people of all levels in all sorts of roles. JDI is always a good approach! Speaking of tester’s intuition, check out one of the earlier blogs in the series on using your intuition, Testing and Bad Smells: When to Investigate Potential Bugs. Thanks Penny for a great post!

Taking you deep into this ever changing industry is software test management consultancy Cania Consulting, comprised of industry leaders who specialize in software testing audit, strategy, and management. They use the techniques and insights provided in this book on a daily basis with their clients and are sharing their insider tips as a key resource for readers in the test management industry. As a young graduate I started looking for potential career opportunities and this eBook has shown me the beauty and complexity of the Test Manager profession from a theoretical standpoint. Discover even more info on A Test Manager’s Guide.

The ‘what if’ should become the leading question of the software research. On the other hand, if you had a bug in the accounting software that caused all of the data to become corrupted every 1,000th time the data was saved, that would have a huge impact but at a very low frequency. The reason I define software testing in this way is that — as any tester will tell you — you can never find all the bugs or defects in a piece of software and you can never test every possible input into the software (for any non-trivial application). Think outside of the box. More and more often we have to deal with assuring quality of various IoT developments. They require testers to become real users for some time and try the most unthinkable scenarios. What we recommend is to start thinking out of the box.

Quarantine software testing advice of the day : One of the biggest challenges when developing or testing software is what to do when you hit a roadblock and cannot seem to get past it. When we are all located together, one of my strategies of “hands-on management” (a term pioneered by Bill Marriott Jr.) is to walk around and ask how people are doing. Often I will find that a person has been stuck on something for a while. Often a fresh pair of eyes will assist and one of us can see the solution. Alternatively I will tell that person to work on something else and come back to it. Usually the next day when they come back, they see the answer right away. That kind of intervention is harder when everyone is remote. Another related issue can be when that same person is dependent on something from another person and they are not both working the same hours remotely. This can happen if one person has to deal with family situations and is working earlier/later hours than they would have worked in the office. Find additional info at https://cania-consulting.com/.