Life of a Tester…

Tester… a term that is not liked by many IT professionals in the current competitive world, yes we do exist. The current scenario is tending towards an agile focussed working where such team division should not exist but in real life scenario, they do exist. Testers are looked upon as someone who is there to find faults and report it. if none are reported he/she is considered as not putting efforts to understand the system and ensuring the quality of the product. Guys Relax… if there are no major defects then it is perfectly fine, this statement would definitely be amusing for many people out there.

If you are Tester, you should know the system in and out functionally which is an expectation but practically you cannot expect a person to know everything. Testers are often not involved in every stage of the project but are expected to know everything, isn't that amazing :-).

Another common behavior that comes right at them is, even though how skillful a tester comes, he is still looked upon as a tester, this would only be affecting the team morale. Why this happens??

This happens because even though the company has transitioned itself to an agile working culture the mindset of teams working is still the same. Approach to an Agile Transformation Journey is the most critical to any organization, know that people would not believe this to be practically achievable but think of a scenario wherein an organization starts to only train the people on this behavior before even they commence on the journey and gradually after they see a positive development in the working culture they start the actual journey of Agile Transformations. This is difficult but it is definitely achievable

To start with having some Team Building exercise to brief every team member on what is the expectation out of them in the coming weeks. Ask a new Team member to lead the Team every month. Performing a 360 feedback every 2 weeks, this is a very crucial meet and needs to be held in separate meeting rooms and should be a healthy one. Now all would be thinking every company has a 360 which is fantastic but how does it work. one fine day we get an email please fill 360 by EOD and on which no feedback is received, (is this 360 ???), if not an email, a sudden meeting would be arranged to get 360 feedback. This is done only to fulfill a process and nothing else.

Such an approach can improve Trust between the Team Members and they would start looking at each of them beyond a job function(Dev, QA, Support, etc..).

Testers/QA should also be given opportunities to develop cross-functional skills, they should not be left to work in one single area. The general practice seen is anyone wishing to change their skills or roles is often met with rigid opposition which only helps in increasing the frustration level of an individual.

To All Testers out there, you guys are doing great!!!

Keep Innovating!!!

This is just my thought of what can be done to improve the work culture and have an amicable environment with a team bonding that looks beyond the job function

That’s all for now

Thank you for reading, you simply Rock!!!!!!

:-)