Teams don’t always understand the impact their roles have on the business outcome, so their lack of focus can affect software quality and lead to an array of disasters. You can help your existing testers become a high-performing QA team focused on goals. Here’s what you can do to transform how your QA team functions.

We tend to contrast automated and manual testing, but really, they should support each other. The key is to define what our testing objectives are, then build the solution needed to achieve them—probably a combination of manual and automated testing. We should not let the method become more important than the results.

We use test design techniques to answer the questions “What do I need to test?” and “What tests should I perform?” We try to ensure test coverage during test automation too, except that choosing poorly creates slower builds and unreliable information about product quality. Here are some guidelines for test selection.