Break down traditional QA silos and empower developers to own quality checks.
If I had a dollar for every testing bottleneck that I’ve experienced in the past, then I’d probably have somewhere close to ten bucks or so. I don’t have any baseline so depending on who’s reading, I could seem rather lucky or be well into the deep end (leave a comment if you’re willing to share your number of occurrences).
It’s become standard practice for QA engineers to find the remedy that will help lessen this burden within the team and get those nifty features or bug fixes into production. But, as I wrote in an earlier article on how ‘Software testing is evolving’, times are changing and we’re all to blame when it comes to testing bottlenecks.
Testing bottlenecks don’t always arise for the same reason, but some patterns do occur that could signal that one could be on the horizon. I won’t go into too much detail about the reasons, but to name a few:
Typical business behaviour has taught us to think that everything needs to be measured and by doing so we’ll be able to identify areas of success and improvement. So, when it comes to testing bottlenecks we try to identify where the problem is occurring, we then look to who is responsible, and focus on trying to reduce this obstacle. With traditional QA practices, all paths would therefore lead to the QA engineer and what actions they may take to reduce the testing bottleneck.
While software development has come a long way, testing practices are often let down by traditional QA practices. There’s still a belief that funnelling all code through a QA person to be tested in and out is the way to go. Instead, we need to rethink our approach and execute a more efficient testing practice, one prime example being Quality Assistance.
The success of a team and their output is accelerated by their seamless collaboration. Traditional QA silos won’t cut it, otherwise, teams will remain the vessel that harbours testing bottlenecks.
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