Software Development is a complex process. It is the combination of requirement, design, coding, testing and ongoing maintenance of a software deliverable. One of the most important components is software testing, because it helps the development team to speed up their development process by detecting defects/bugs before the delivery to the client. And software testing ensures that products are of high quality and customer satisfaction and increase the team collaboration. Software testing helps in saving the money and leading to faster time to market. In this blog, I would like to share my experience about how to build a Testing Culture in a new project.
Why Build a Testing Culture?
Testing Culture refers to the set of values, attitudes and behaviors within an organization that prioritize quality assurance through testing. The goals are catching issues as soon as possible in the development process, improving testing efficiency, reducing defects, and increasing customer satisfaction. It encourages Developers, Testers, BAs, and other stakeholders to share knowledge and take shared ownership of testing.
While building a Testing Culture, there are lot of challenges, such as
- It is difficult to change the mindset of team members
- We might lack of resources like tools, infrastructures, and training
- If senior leaders do not prioritize testing and quality, it can be difficult to create a Testing Culture as well
- Beside that many developers like to work in isolate, focus on specifics tasks and responsibilities
Key Steps for Building a Testing Culture
In my experience, to start building a Testing Culture in a new project, we can device into 3 stages.
- First 30 Days – Goals: number of issues found as early as possible; number of defects reduce
- Conduct training within the team to share the important of testing and the benefits of a strong Testing Culture
- Start incorporating testing tools and frameworks into development flow, like Unit Testing tools, automation tools and CI/CD
- Implement Review process as soon as possible
- Set the SMART goal for the team such as goal for unit test coverage, goal for automation test
- Next 30 Days – Observe the attitudes and behaviors of the team.
- Whether the team members are willing to share their ideas, opinions, concerns, understanding about their testing’s experiences
- Should we need to improve processes, tools, or skills?
- Do we deliver a product with high quality?
- Final 30 Days
- Conduct retrospectives to evaluate the goals
- Implement continuous testing and integrate automated testing into the development flow
- Recognize and reward team members who contribute to the building Testing Culture
After 90 days, you can get a good sense of whether the attitudes and behaviors of your team are good or not by evaluating the team’s communication, accountability, learning, attention to detail, and results-oriented approach. Encourage your team to keeping up with the good work, and you can identify further areas for improvement and develop a plan for continued testing culture growth.
Value of applying Testing Culture in projects
So when we build a Testing Culture successfully, it will bring a lot of values for the organization
- Increase collaboration and teamwork
- Employee engagement
- Increased productivity
- Continuous improvement
Reference
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