Collaborative Testing

If your team consists of many new team bees who are going to test a complex release and you don't have enough time for training and knowledge sharing sessions, what do you do? You may ask them to do exploratory testing, take up some test cases and execute the steps. If business logic of the system is so complex, then new team members have to interact with senior members of the team for every question they have. That means seniors will have to spend considerable amount of their time to clarify the doubts of new bees. In such situations seniors may not get the time to complete their assignments.

What do you do in such situation? You want your new guys to pick up product functionality quickly, at the same time contributing to the testing efforts. This requires more collaboration, brain storming, and quick meetings in the team.

How about team is sitting in a conference room during the testing cycle rather than sitting in their work bays? Team located across the table can have more interaction, more discussions, brain storming, frequent bug bash sessions. Testing in Collaboration encourages testers to explore the application more, improves the knowledge, brings the team together. This approach reduces the duplicate bugs, and increases quality bugs. This approach helps development, analysts and test team huddle quickly to discuss any changes in requirements and technical aspects of the system.

I have seen the advantages of this technique in one of my project releases, in which we achieved good test coverage, brain storming new test ideas, sharing of knowledge and tools, found good bugs. Testers working on one module and sometimes people across multiple modules worked from huddle rooms throughout the testing cycle. Collaboration is the key to success of any project- it brings the people, ideas, and techniques together for greater test results. Such collaboration techniques can produce high quality releases esp. with new teams, changing requirements, and complex systems.

Approach outlined here can also be implemented not necessarily when there are new members in the team, but can be applied with existing members too.This technique can also applied not only for testing, but for all disciplines of software development. Recent studies quote that there is more room for ideas in a smaller offices and such technique improves collaboration and productivity.

Happy Testing.