For decades brainstorming has been our go-to method for ideation, yet it holds back our success when the environment doesn't encourage everyone to contribute. Instead, try brainwriting—writing ideas on paper and letting teammates iterate on them. It improves not only the quantity of ideas you get, but also the quality.

Tools are a normal part of testing jobs because they can amplify our ability to learn about product quality. It's a good idea to review new tools for automation, performance, or monitoring to see if some solution will help you test better. Before you even look at tools, though, there are two questions you should ask.

Test design can contribute greatly to how manageable and maintainable your automation is. Hiding detailed steps in actions makes their automation easier to maintain, and the high-level actions can be leveraged to define less common tests. Here's how you can write tests as a sequence of actions to improve coverage.