You are bound to bump into several roadblocks when engaging a testing partner to organize a software test. As you work with your testing partner, remember that the relationship is not about finding bugs and making things perfect. Instead, the association is about teaming up to solve real business problems efficiently using various methods, from exploratory testing to empirical quantitative analysis.
So, if you want to collaborate with a testing partner, you must understand the challenges you might face during this journey. The following sections address some of the critical challenges that will affect your engagement and illustrate how these challenges may manifest in different ways.
Challenge 1: Problem Statement Understanding
The first challenge in working with a testing partner is understanding your problem statement. The problem statement defines the business or user need and sets expectations for how to approach testing. It also outlines the product owner’s goals, which should help your testing partner to understand what you want to achieve with the testing effort. This is the most crucial step because your testing partner can only create effective test plans if you clearly understand what needs to be tested.
Solution:
Hearing It Through Reiteration: You want to ensure that what you are hearing is what you want to hear and not just being told, “this is how it is.” You must ask questions and ensure you fully understand what the testing partner is saying. This can be not easy if there are many people involved or if the person speaking isn’t clear about what they want or what they mean.
Relay It Back to Make Sure You Have Understood: Once you have heard it through re-iteration, do not just let it go at that. If anything needs to be clarified, ask them again and try to understand better. This can help in making sure that all parties are on the same page as far as understanding goes so there will be no communication gaps between them. It also helps if another person who understands both sides of things can be present during these discussions so that one side doesn’t feel like they are constantly being judged by someone else who may not fully understand what they are saying.
Challenge 2: Ramp up, Ramp Down
Your needs will change over time. The speed of development and need for testing isn’t constant, and the testing partner cannot adjust and scale up or down. You might expect that you will be able to do a lot of testing at one point, but it will become more complicated as your project evolves. The testing partner must adapt to that and scale up or down accordingly.
Solution:
The key to success here is to have a good plan before engaging with the testing partner. This can include developing a roadmap that outlines how they will support you, what needs to be completed by when, and who is responsible for each stage of the process. This helps ensure you have an accurate understanding of when things are happening so that you are aware of the situation when things get busy or need to shift around during development.
This can be done by creating a practical demand management framework that enables you to set milestones for specific features and the resources required for each milestone. It would help if you also had a clear definition of what constitutes a successful test case and how long it takes to test these cases to meet these milestones.
Challenge 3: Attrition
Attrition is one of the most challenging issues you will face when outsourcing software testing services. You must be ready because some of your best resources may leave after a couple of years. This is especially true if they are senior engineers and managers who have been with you for many years, know the ins and outs of your products and processes, and can contribute significantly to improving your outcomes.
If you do not plan for attrition, it will be hard to find replacements for these people, who are valuable assets to your company. The main challenge here is how much time you can afford to invest in training people when they join. Can you afford to lose productivity over a few months?
Solution:
When outsourcing to a testing partner, you need to ensure that your testing team is prepared for the transition. You should:
Create Quick Onboarding Kits: If your team is responsible for delivering software, create a quick onboarding kit that includes information on how to add new tests and integrate them with existing test plans.
Keep Shadow Resources: If your team is responsible for delivering software, keep shadow resources on hand if something goes wrong during the transition. This will help ensure that someone on hand can go back into production immediately and fix any issues that may arise.
Lean but Effective Knowledge Management in Place: The best way to ensure that your testing team is ready for success is by providing them with lean but effective knowledge management tools. These tools allow them to easily access relevant information and stay up-to-date with any changes occurring within the organization’s IT environment.
In The End
When working with a testing partner, it’s essential to use proper communication and documentation. These are the keys to avoiding problems in terms of quality and time. Suppose you are working with a large organization. In that case, there is likely a group of testing professionals who have worked together before, so this is fine in situations where you need to work with a small organization or one that is new to the process and coordinate up-front.
Read also on Do you “Trust” your Quality Partner?
