Bloggers Club November 2022 — Three things that have helped me demonstrate the value I bring to a team

  • How come it’s not so obvious what we do, how we help a team/customers, and the value we bring?
    • The work presented by the developers is more tangible, the same goes for many other professions such as designers, where they have a visual output of their work. For testers, this is different, since testing is not that visible to the customer, or sometimes the management. Testers can shed light on their activities by advocating quality and being proactive communicators - try speaking to everyone in their own language. For example, developers will wholeheartedly agree that good software architecture has a direct positive impact on the app's testability and overall quality - a well-architectured app will have a lot fewer bugs to find in the first place. And when dealing with managers, translate everything into the language of money. How much will the company lose, if a certain feature doesn't get the (minimum) testing needed after we have assessed and accepted the risks we discover.
  • What things have you done that made a huge difference in changing the perception of the value you and your role bring to a team?
    • Start with small things, sharing an interesting article about testing with your team, asking non-testers to go with you to testing events, and trying to include the team more in the testing activities. Try out things like 3 amigos sessions,  mob or pair testing, and also peer reviews. Not just for code reviews, but also to review acceptance criteria and review tests as well.
  • How can we help each other to demonstrate our value? What real examples and stories can we share with each other?
    • In my experience mob testing really paid off and was well-accepted by the team. We discovered some interesting edge cases which proved to be too elusive for a single person to find. Involving the developers in the automation also helps greatly and has many benefits. I have witnessed this from a BDD-colored perspective. By reviewing and having reviewed the test scenarios for automation, developers will contribute from their perspective. They can give tips on how scenarios can be improved in order to be more easily automatable. Also, maybe even more importantly, the developers can realize ways in which the feature could be adapted to make it more testable and robust - as it's done inTest Driven Development. Thirdly, by having testers and business stakeholders involved in these reviews, everyone involved gets their domain knowledge improved.


Comments

  1. TammyNovember 19, 2022 at 6:32 PM

    I totally agree on starting out with small things to add value. In addition, my last employment, we used to have like a work session which helped a lot to add value.

    ReplyDelete

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