Dealing with the stressful reality of testing in today’s fast paced development cycles
Our lives are full of stress both at work and at home.
Is seems at times that there aren’t enough hours in the day, and everyone around us has their demands for our time, which is forever limited.
Working in the current climate of Software and Application QA, the stress seems higher than ever.
The shift to Agile testing, CI and fast testing cycles, means every minute of testing counts. Everyone wants instant gratification as well as quality products, from management to customer. Often, it could seem to others in the organization or in the development teams that we, as QA gatekeepers, are “the bottleneck”.
How is the world of testing dealing with this pressure?
- Automation: Many teams seek ways to add more automation, and cut time on repetitive tests.
- Shifting to an Agile or DevOps approach: Working in this fashion speeds up the common “back and forth” between more traditionally separated ‘them’ (a.k.a developers and programmers) and ‘us’ (Testers), and even further up to the IT departments.
- Outsourcing: Other solutions have been outsourcing testing to “bulk testing” services using outsourcing or even crowdsourcing. Where their time is focused solely on the testing tasks without the other workplace distraction and interference of “unscheduled” testing etc.
How should you personally deal with testing under pressure?
We have previously addressed this matter of “shutting off the noise” with meditation here in the blog, and it is still one method I recommend.
But there are many other ways of handling stressful work schedules and demands. Starting with how to organize your workspace, communicate with peers and superiors to get results, proper test prioritizing and more.
I will be going into this very point in my upcoming webinar this week, and invite you to join and discover:
- How to generate good visibility and company accountability for testing
- Ways to implement better testability considerations into the development project schedule
- The importance of fragmenting and prioritizing your tests when working on high pressure environments
As always, I welcome any suggestions you might have from your experience on handling the stress of testing.
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Source: QA Intelligence blog
Testing Under Stress
