Over the past few years, more and more professionals have preferred to work remotely. If there were not very many people who wanted to work from home before the coronavirus pandemic, then over the past few years, it has become a popular trend. On the one hand, this can solve several problems, but it can significantly complicate personnel management processes. Offers five valuable tips to help set up management for remote QA teams.
Plan your work
It is crucial that all employees feel like members of one big team. So, every day (or once a week), you can hold meetings via video communication to discuss upcoming plans and news and distribute work. It is essential that each person from the team can ask questions, report on the job done, and make suggestions.
For software testing and QA to be carried out qualitatively, it is necessary to distribute responsibilities in advance and set specific time frames. Don’t forget to record this for yourself so that you don’t forget who is responsible for which area of work.
Use live documents
All progressive companies today use living documents. Their main advantage is that you can give each team member access to them.
Such documents may include general information about the order, scope of work and deadlines, reports from other team members, and much more. Try to make even the most insignificant remarks for you, which will be helpful to both new team members and for a more detailed analysis of the software in the future.
If some information is confidential and you do not want all team members to have access to it, then you can set restrictions.
Arrange for a status update
Before starting work on the project, the responsible specialist should break it down into small tasks. Further, these tasks are distributed among team members. Once the job is completed, you must update its status.
In most cases, it is not enough to mark “done,” it is necessary to provide the work results. A typical status update might include:
- Information about what blocks or slows down testing;
- A short list of issues that were found;
- Overview of issues that may block project release;
- Outline future work plans.
In addition, if your company charges by the hour, the specialist must also indicate how much time he or she spent completing tasks.
It is also desirable that the specialist provide information about QA performance metrics. It will help you understand how effectively the application works.
Develop a bug logging and triage process
Each team member must understand how to log bugs that are found. Try to develop a precise classification of errors and explain to all testers (or better, create an appropriate document) the sorting principle.
All team members must have access to a document where all errors will be recorded. It is preferable that specialists can double-check the work one after another and be able to ask each other questions and make recommendations.
If problems cannot be verified in real-time, testers need to know where and how they should report defects that block further testing or indicate severe issues in the system.
The program or app testing life cycle should include rechecking for bugs after fixes have been made. That is why you should not delete any problems from your internal registry.
Definition of responsibility
You need to understand that in addition to working on a specific project, the team must perform several other tasks, such as:
- Parallel search for new orders;
- Creation of releases;
- Resolution of controversial issues;
- Consultations and much more.
This work can be assigned to one or two people or distributed among team members. For example, one person will answer phone calls and communicate with potential customers.
No matter how well you do your job, failures and mistakes are always possible. You should clearly understand this and laytime to finalize some points.
Improve team communication
When the whole testers work in the same office, it will not be difficult to establish communication. In conditions of remote work, this can be pretty difficult to do.
The leader should pay more attention to solving organizational issues. You can work in a centralized manner where one person makes all decisions and manages all processes. Or you can introduce all team members and let them decide some of the decisions themselves. Of course, in the second case, you cannot expect everything to work without failures, but you can devote time to more important things.
Conclusion
The small way of working has long proven its effectiveness. Still, you need to think in advance about the principles of communication between team members, logging errors and advice on fixing them, and working with clients. If everything is done correctly in the first stages of work, you can quickly achieve good results.
