I’ve been watching some colleagues go through the difficult process of redefining their testing processes. Process change isn’t always easy. I know because I’ve been successful and I’ve failed. One of the things that strikes me, is the testers that I perceive as ineffective are the most vocal about process change and that they like to maintain the status quo because it’s how it’s always been.
We’re testers; why do we not test our own processes?
We may find out that that they are non-functional, unusable, poorly performing, unmanageable, rife with manual effort and document proliferation, lacking integration with other teams and processes, failing to provide accountability and not suitable for the business we are in. There; that is all eight disciplines in the disciplined approach to software testing. This means we can test our own processes with the tools we already have.
The issue is that we don’t ask why. We ask it every day when it comes to software but when it comes to us and how we work we’re too close to the product and too inconvenienced by change. Perhaps we could get a friend outside your organisation to test our processes or maybe we could just think about it.
|
Ryan Boucher is a Software Inquisitor and is passionate about it. You can find a whole raft of articles and anecdotes about software testing and other topics he gets excited about. |
| Tags |
2 Responses to “Why don’t we test our own processes?”
Updating our processes keeps us current and useful in our teams. I think it is important to make sure our processes are helping us and moving us forward, instead of holding us back.
I am currently working on getting a fairly new QA department up and running and we have so much adjusting to do, but each time we evaluate, I feel like we improve.
Good Post!
Thanks for the comments Devon. I hope you do get the necessary adjustments complete so you processes work for you.