Collaboration: A tester and a programmer can discover problems earlier in the development, like pages that fail on submission and errors from bad data, simply by working together. Collaboration can save time and money, so why not encourage it?

Technical Practices: The technical skills are important to make good use of the reduced number of bugs that collaborative work brings. A talented technical tester can do successfully various jobs, like writing and improving a code, discovering problems, building new automation frameworks and tests, and working on build and continuous integration systems.

Better Release Decisions
Many times a new code is being sent by developers–regardless the data facts- with few or no unit tests. However the product is ready for release only when the number of facts found per test starts to drop. A better coverage is available by splitting testing in two categories:

Technical testing: Shows in reports how many lines, methods or functions are used by a test. The technical coverage tools are installed on the build system and they analyze code and produce reports.

Non-Technical testing: The more familiar parts to the customer, like features, menu options, and configuration choices, can be checked by testers in a non-technical way.

The combination of technical and non-technical test categories is the one that helps managers see the progress of testing more clearly and end up making better release decisions.



Skills over Money
When companies hire employees who just graduated from college, they highly risk the level of customers’ satisfaction and the level of easy collaboration among co-workers. So, a cost down strategy of saving money through more inexpensive –but also less experienced- employees, eventually costs more in required repairs and customers who are not renewing their contracts. Choosing skilled technical employees is an investment as you save money in the long run.

Running skill development sessions during working days, keep teams focused on current problems they are experiencing. A session can be based on a rotating list of skills, like domain testing, using databases, or note taking. A creative way to approach these sessions, like a dice game, is the key to which will make people to think about testing in a different format.

Pick one goal
Choose the goal you want to achieve by the end of the year and stay focused on it. Release new initiatives only when you have already limited the work in progress to one or two projects. After one year, you can check the goals-list you have created and see how far you came. Moreover, a clear direction and defined criteria will help to count the success of the idea. On the other hand, adding a lot of improvement ideas will weaken the power of one project. That simple.

By putting new approaches in priority and not spending precious time in fixing software already in production, you are closer on a more successful year of testing!

Visit our website to see how other companies like yours are succeeding with the power of Validata!