6 proven tactics to boost your testing team productivity

Updated on September 20, 2021 by Magdalena Korgul, Senior Content Specialist at Deviniti

It goes without saying that a testing team is part of practically every software development project today. Product quality has become more critical than ever, and companies bend over backward to deliver fantastic software. Every organization aims to create a smooth and reliable development process that ensures that tasks are completed within a given range and time frame. If one of its elements is testing, then you need to make sure that it doesn’t become a bottleneck. Since testing is not a linear, entirely predictable process, that can be a challenge. But despite the specificity of the testing process, you can do a lot to support your testing team. Here are 6 strategies to make the productivity of your testing team soar and match your software development process.

If you decide to rely on a single type of testing, your process might turn out to be ineffective. You’ll risk getting results that are incomplete or inaccurate. That’s why it’s smart to hire and train team members in different areas of testing. A testing team that boasts a diverse set of testing skills can solve problems and tackle challenges efficiently.

You need engineers who ace test automation, specialists in exploratory tests, as well as talented manual testers. All of them bring a different value to your team to ensure that their work translates into product quality. Since different types of tests have different objectives, greater diversity will mean that your product will be checked in many aspects to ensure top quality.

To stay productive, a testing team needs a set of specialized tools for test planning and execution. The solutions you pick can seriously boost the productivity of your team. That’s why it’s so important to choose the right tools.

When picking tools for your team, take various aspects into account:

From our experts’ experience, one of the most critical factors is the ability of the tool to adapt to your testing process. Since every process is specific, not every tool will match your needs. That’s why it’s so important to start with understanding your project requirements, as well as identifying the key criteria suitable for it.

Jira is now the most commonly used issue tracker tool. If you use Jira Software to manage software development projects, consider adding a specialized app from the Atlassian Marketplace that will enrich Jira with testing functionalities. TestFLO is a good example of an app that is deeply integrated with Jira and very flexible to enable exact configuration with the aim of matching a given testing process. Here, it’s worth mentioning that we should also draw attention to the tool vendor’s reputation, support quality, and tool update frequency.

Automation is a popular trend in software testing – it’s predicted that the automation testing market will grow at 14.2% during the period from 2021 to 2026. Introducing automated tests to a process helps to reduce the number of repetitive tasks realized by a testing team in test cycles. Automatic testing is especially useful for carrying out smoke tests that should be part of your process whenever you’re releasing software. Smoke tests help to ensure that the basic functionalities of the product work flawlessly.

Naturally, every software may experience requirements change during the implementation phase. You can prepare for that by making sure that automatic test codes are maintained properly. Still, the amount of work required for setting up automatic testing is much lower than manual testing for the same functionalities.

Testing teams are often at a loss about what they should be doing when the next portion of the software hasn’t been delivered yet. To make the most of your team’s time during that initial phase, engage it in requirement review to find mistakes before the implementation phase begins. That type of approach helps to reduce development costs and get a deeper insight into the software right from the start.

When the requirements are confirmed and ready for implementation, your testing team can start test case writing. You don’t need to wait until specific functionalities are finished. Depending on the level of detail in your requirements, you can start writing tests with detailed steps, or at least prepare a draft list of test cases that should be written down and tested for given functionalities.

Apart from using the standard testing models, such as waterfall, agile, and spiral, you can implement a modern approach, which is quality assurance. Shift-left testing mandates the support of the testing team during the earliest stages of product development, and postulates continuing the testing phase simultaneously with consecutive steps. Continuous testing approach, a DevOps concept, on the other hand, allows for testing at regular intervals with every new code iteration.

Communication is the key to smooth collaboration between project team members. Innovative technologies help teams exchange information through a variety of communication tools such as email, instant messaging, or issues in project management tools such as Jira.

But sometimes, that’s just not enough. If team members communicate only through these channels of communication, they should be aware that delays and misunderstandings may happen. In other words, nothing beats direct face-to-face communication. Getting someone on the phone or video conferencing is another smart way team members can get all the information they need quickly.

How does that work for testing teams? Testers often need additional information from software developers or business analysts to carry out tests. They need a method for quickly communicating a problem they discovered. But they also require a communication strategy that enables them to help developers in reproducing problems. Direct collaboration and communication between various team members is key to boosting the productivity of the testing team, as well as other teams that are part of the project.

If the entire project team can’t work in a single place – for example, because teams are too large or work remotely – make sure to organize regular online meetings between team members who collaborate directly. Establish standards for video and voice communication to ensure that the transmission of information is more accurate and faster.

We went over this issue in our article Key challenges to software testing in Jira and solutions to them ← click to read about our thoughts and solutions.

No piece of software is developed in a vacuum. Companies create software for a given domain such as finance, transportation, public administration, and many others. That’s why the domain knowledge of your testing team can be so valuable depending on the project in which they take participate.

Considerable knowledge in a given area allows testers to better understand the functional and business requirements of the software. That type of understanding has a significant impact on the productivity of a testing team. How to spread domain knowledge to reach testers? Organize a special training session with someone who knows the context for a given project. Another good idea is distributing materials among team members to help them prepare for participating in new projects.

Use these 6 approaches, and you’ll be on your way to improving the performance of your testing team, but also the collaboration between different teams within the same project.

Using a single work platform like Jira Software for the whole process from requirements to release is crucial for all your teams to be happy and productive. If you’d like to learn more about test management in Jira Software, check out this video tutorial series on our YouTube. Also, read more on bringing requirements and test management into Jira: