Respect is a major player when it comes to creating and maintaining a cohesive team, and plenty of testers today feel they’re lacking the respect of their peers. With test automation sometimes being seen as some magical solution to fixing bugs, the usefulness of manual testers has come into question.
A long-time freelancer in the tech industry, Josiah Renaudin is now a web content producer and writer for TechWell, StickyMinds, and Better Software magazine. Previously, he wrote for popular video game journalism websites like GameSpot, IGN, and Paste Magazine, where he published reviews, interviews, and long-form features. Josiah has been immersed in games since he was young, but more than anything, he enjoys covering the tech industry at large.
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Unlike waterfall, where people had to do their best to explain the value of automation, agile more naturally promotes that need for these tools through its rapidity and integration of testing throughout the development process. Agile assumes automation is the key ingredient of your mission strategy.
If you accept that it’s OK to make the same mistakes over and over, you’ll never give yourself the opportunity to grow. If you don’t grow, you won’t improve your software. A writer should always ask why an editor did what he did, and a developer should understand how he can fix the code he broke.
Mobile or PC apps that crash, have poor user experience, don’t run smoothly, or lack features give your customer the idea that whatever they bought didn’t get the tender, loving care it deserved—even if they know the issues can be fixed in a later release.
Is software harder to make? The inclusion of additional team members throughout the process has made the flow of development a bit more difficult than it has been in the past. Sure, software quality might be at an all-time high, but the journey there has a few more twists and turns.
In order to satisfy the people you hope will purchase or download your software, a proper customer and user experience process has to be built into the software development lifecycle. Whether you follow an agile, waterfall, or completely different methodology, this is a step that can’t be skipped.
How do you promote effective communication among a group of individuals, especially in agile? That’s the big question. In a world where some people might even have differing definitions of the actual word “communication,” it can seem impossible to get everyone on the same page.