Three Smart New Year’s Resolutions for a Testing Organization
New Year’s resolutions are exciting. They help us look back at past successes and learnings, ponder our plans for the coming year, and recharge ourselves for what is in store. Resolutions give us the opportunity to be proactive in starting the year with a bang and thinking big.
Thinking through what the resolutions should be for my testing organization, I stumbled on three interesting posts that provided additional insight into the overall thought process on where the software testing discipline is heading. These resolutions may help align your work with industry demands.
A keynote session at QAI’s 2013 conference talked about the recently released 2013–2014 World Quality Report. The speaker discussed trends and recommendations for the audience to take away from the study.
Several speakers at the conference talked about the need to “shift left” or move quality upstream. One of the speakers talked about the need to “shift right” and to look at end users’ expectations and incorporate them in the quality strategy.
The report provided useful numbers directly from the field on how the spend on quality is increasing yearly and becoming an important portion of the CIO’s budget. It also talked about the growing demand for mobile testing, the struggle that organizations still face with test environment setup and the lack of specialists in this space, the slight slowing in embracing the cloud due to security and performance concerns, and the age-old metrics that test teams continue to use.
The second post talks about the move into a world of services and how testing should become more “TestOps,” or working in unison with operations in sifting through big data that most organizations generate. Ultimately, this would derive key performance indicators for the product under test rather than a mere pass/fail that test teams have traditionally tracked.
The final resolution-worthy post I found suggested looking at the real future of testing by removing the knowledge of tools, technologies, and domains. It talks about testing’s grassroots that rest with core functional testing, be it through formal specification-based test design or exploratory test design.
All these sources of information were valuable as I set our testing organization’s resolutions for the year. I think we should strive to focus on the following:
- A balance between shifting left and right, settling on a neutral test strategy to incorporate not just collaborating with internal teams but also collaborating with end users
- A strategy that does not forget the roots of core functional testing and the tester’s creativity, which makes him a great fit for the role
- Ongoing investments in building a testing ecosystem with a first step in the direction of an automated test lab in the cloud
It is exciting to see independent software vendors expecting testing services providers to step up and deliver actionable results and suggestions to help them draw more meaningful key performance indicators from test cycles. These are optimistic indicators of a bright future for software testing, and I cannot be more excited to align the year’s resolutions with these indicators.
