Team work & collaboration are key to enable great software quality. Below are 6 tasks to do on a consistent basis:
1) Understand the key business processes
This helps set a firm understanding of the critical business operations and the stakeholders’ technology interaction to achieve their objectives. It will help you create /add to critical business test scenarios that are relied upon in everyday operations. You will add value by focusing on what matters for the business to run smoothly rather than on executing unnecessary test scripts.
2) Engage with your end users
Do you know who your customers are of ‘x’ product/service and how they/would be impacted by the new feature/product? What about how they may use the new solution to accomplish their everyday tasks? Always keep the end user experience in mind. After all, we are delivering value to users to help them be efficient in their daily tasks and to optimize the business’s value and growth.
3) Collaborate with your customer support team
They know about the reported defects and sub-optimal experiences customers often report or talk about. This provides the business an opportunity to understand where they can focus in on and capitalize. It also provides the development team with a focus to identify where improvements in the product can be made and how to better test it in order to provide for a better user experience.
4) Learn from each other (your team members)
We all have unique skill sets and experiences. This activity provides innumerable benefits such as an avenue to acquire technical understanding, to establish rapport and be valued, as well as to better understand the bigger picture objectives that the team is striving to aim for on a product and organizational scale.
5) Leverage the power of analytics
If your business is currently collecting analytical data, you’re one step ahead of the competition. With this power, the product owner/business stakeholders and team can better understand how users are actually using the technology solution. It gives us insight to drive data-driven decision making that would help influence how a company can adjust to the right strategic objectives with the capital that they have at the right time to optimize their growth.
It gives the team an understanding of the customer journeys most often encountered. This is helpful to how the application is used. It also help businesses find areas that can be improved or new focus areas to discover to enable for a seamless user experience.
6) Liaison with your business analysts/product owners
Actively collaborate with these folks to understand the bigger business objectives in order to help prepare better development & test strategies. By understanding which work/initiative delivers greater customer value, this helps avoid an overhead of “busy work”. This ‘busy work” upfront can result into a nightmare if business decisions change. Remember: always welcome & expect change.
Adopting an agile team mindset helps the team focus on delivering value that optimizes business success and empowers customers.
Happy Testing!
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