The highly technical and complicated nature of software testing can turn off the very people tasked with overseeing these operations. While quality assurance managers may handle the day-to-day tasks and duties, their superiors are ultimately the ones calling the shots and putting resources in place to aid QA teams. Because those executives may not share the specialized expertise and knowledge of their software testers, they might be unsure of how to best support QA efforts. In order to bridge the knowledge gap between on-the-ground team members and C-level officers, QA management should establish a foundation for sharing information among various enterprise employees.
Quality assurance expert and Software Testing Help team member Swati Seela argued that accountability and transparency were vital components to any project, offering insight regarding every stage of the process. She explained that everyone from testers and managers to executives benefit when information is freely shared with each other. The best way to disseminate this data is through the creation of daily reports detailing every aspect of ongoing testing efforts.
For managers, daily reports enable them to properly gauge the productivity of their team members. Given the solitary nature of many aspects of software development, it's important that team leaders have some method of overseeing processes and ensuring that everyone is pulling his or her weight. This shouldn't be a concern for testers. If they are working hard and effectively tackling their duties, this will shine through in their reports. Furthermore, as Seela noted, this documentation will verify that each tester is fully aware of what his or her actual responsibilities are. This way, any confusion regarding who should be doing what can be eliminated.
Use a comprehensive system for filing reports
IT consultant Rex Black urged QA teams to establish a solid foundation for creating, storing and disseminating internal reports. Without the proper framework in place, software testers may be unable to effectively record test automation results, bug reports, and other important documents and distribute them to their managers. This could severely hamper the project's progress as the information contained in these files will often provide the insight needed to refocus the team's efforts and resources to maximize productivity.
"I organize my own test projects around structured, organized, measurable test systems with carefully devised test cases and formal bug tracking databases; from these I extract meaningful metrics and aggregate data," Black wrote. "Some test managers use test systems with more documentation than I do, some are more comfortable with less, and you should use whatever test system works most effectively for you and your test organization."
Even if QA leaders don't want to necessarily be buried in reports, they should still have a formal structure in place to facilitate documentation. A development project can quickly go off the rails if redundancies and inefficiencies are allowed to persist. Daily reporting ensures that everyone is tackling the right processes and doing so as effectively as a possible. A comprehensive test management system is the ideal platform for storing and sharing test results and other files regarding a team's progress. By placing all documentation in a single place, QA management, C-level officers and software testers will all have access to information detailing the unit's overall effectiveness.