It’s never easy to be a software tester. A list of challenges come along the way when a software tester plans to carry on his/her projects. Testing is said to be the most challenging stage of the software development life-cycle because it demands some extra attention, a high level of technical knowledge, and a specific set of skills from the software testers. Testing is a job just similar to the job of a cashier in a bank. If you know how hard and troublesome the job of a cashier is then you would definitely beware of a tester’s duties. Without balancing cash, a cashier is said to stay in the office. However, without tracking and hunting defects in the software products and apps, a software tester is said to work even extra hours.
Quality assurance is a necessary process because it enables an organization to be more productive by providing the best quality software products and services as per the demands and expectations of end-users. From writing codes to hunting or spotting errors and managing the test cases it’s a continuous pain in the neck for software testers. It can be more troublesome if incorporating such heavy efforts and energies won’t pay off later after the product gets released in the market. In short, software tester’s shoulders are the load lifters of the organizations. Testers sum up to be the backbone of every product’s success and failure. Therefore, it’s necessary for organizations to come up with some practices and helping hands that can ease the burden of testers while getting them out of the long term trouble zone.
Considering this matter, we have come up with some ways that an organization can ensure in its internal testing environment to ease the burden of their teams and empower them to focus on more valuable tasks.
Self-organizing and Managing is Key to Success – If an organization wants to achieve its desired testing objectives and goals then they must empower their team to self organize or manage themselves. The team members must be given a right to manage and distribute their workloads and tasks among each other. This will not only strengthen teamwork and coordination but also it will develop a sense of a little work freedom between team members. Teams that are always working on the orders of their managers are able to get frustrated and bored and then the whole testing process has to suffer.
Train your Staff Often About New Technologies – If you want your organization to grow, you must have to indulge in such practices that make your staff feel that organization is giving value towards an employee’s professional growth. This will not only be beneficial for software testers but for the organization as well. How? It will allow employees to update their knowledge base and brains about the upcoming technologies and new trends among the market and they will try to implement it in their testing methods to better conduct testing. Thus a win-win situation for both software testers and organizations.
Tools – As Helping Hand – The Use of specific tools, for example; test case management tools for managing test cases is a proven helping hand for organizations as it allows testers to focus on more valuable tasks while allowing them to save their time and energy. Nothing is more frustrating and time-consuming than repetitive processes. Across software lifecycles, and even different projects, the same test cases may be used on a regular basis. For this purpose, if you incorporate the use of test case management tools your tester’s life would become easy and peaceful. Because half of the burden of testers can be divided.
Expectations Must be Realistic – Quality assurance Managers and leaders often think that software testers are not humans like them. They set unrealistic expectations like 100% bug leakage coverage and fixtures. However, doing this is the organization’s first step toward failure. Testers are already under a lot of pressure, so putting lofty objectives on top of them is not likely to make the quality of their work improve. While test management can certainly help identify and mitigate issues early, this does not mean that all vulnerabilities will be caught. Defects may still appear even well after an application is released, making monitoring and testing important initiatives throughout the software’s lifecycle.
