Prioritize Testing Tasks by Prioritizing Your Audiences
What do you do as a lone-wolf tester when literally everything needs to be done? Do you write test cases, automate, and perform exploratory testing? If you spend time on any one thing, something else gets neglected, increasing the possibility that you’ll never be able to actually complete any one thing. This is a situation some testers find themselves in if they are the only testers for a small project or organization.
The solution to prioritizing work is a matter of prioritizing audiences. A tester’s work has an audience: users, coworkers, and bosses. Testing is a service we provide to each audience, so it is important to know which audience is at the top of the "make happy" list.
Will users always take precedence? Not exactly. If a release or a fix is not pressing, then users may not be the most important audience at the moment. Maybe the most important audience during that phase is your build guy, who could take a vacation day once in a while if you learned to do the builds.
Sit with the build guy for an hour, take very good notes, and practice on your own. Invest a couple of hours to help an important audience, your team, since users are not waiting on some hot release. The team succeeds or fails together.
Perhaps the most important audience at the moment is even…you. Even though you have test cases that need to be written or a test program to write, you may have a notebook full of disparate notes and cryptic pictograms that you’re always hunting through to find what you need. Maybe taking a few hours to type your notes in an organized fashion, print some useful pages out, and tack them to your desk would increase your efficiency and your peace of mind. Sometimes you have to prioritize yourself to hone your edge.
When faced with the dilemma of what to do next as a solo tester or as a lead tester doling out tasks, take a pen and scrawl out your audiences by name. List the concurrent projects and needs as well. Remember, you can’t complete every task at once, so the important thing is to focus on completing the most important tasks first—one at a time.
Making your audiences happy is more important than merely checking off tasks, so prioritize tasks by audience and don’t obsess over the task list itself. You may find that tasks that weigh heavily on you don’t have an important audience at the moment, so you can let them go and free your mind to focus on making the right people happy at the right time.
Learn to prioritize your audiences and you’ll always be able to sift the neverending list of tasks into a manageable queue.
