How to deal with non process oriented organization?

Question

I'm working in a organization since 3 month as an automation engineer. Sometime I feel comfortable with my work,Here my responsibilities are analyze end to end product feature, automate them, help out colleagues and troubleshooting the problems. Everything are fine they are happy with my performance no doubt.

But the manual testing process here is not good. Its a startup organization, and we are following Agile (somewhere there is lacking to follow complete process) also using JIRA . The person who take care all the project related things andd coordinate with the company owner is not from technical background. He thoughts like we can work like machine, He don't want to allow all the team to use JIRA (time consuming process as per him) and want to work in adhoc manner and everything in hurry.

So sometime, i also need to look some manual testing (7-8 hrs in a week). The process and atmosphere sometime irritates me even most of colleagues are on same point.

So, can someone suggest, How do a person deal in such situation ? Obviously Only I can not establish or change the process. But can approach to some technical person on upper level ? OR do i have concentrate on my work and provide the output they expecting from me without involving in top level management things ?

Answer 1

In my experience this tension is fairly typical in every organization I work in. My advice:

• Criticism is often not received well so I focus more on improvement suggestions
• Consider a 1:1 with the person concerned to go over your concerns in more detail
• Use analogies like Oil Changes, Investments, Plants, Gardens to refer to the investment of time and resources to maintain quality.
• Find out the right balance in your organization so that you are both getting stuff done but also contributing suggestions for change.
• Read a lot of leadership style books in the Agile space so you can make better arguments and refer to more real world examples others have seen.
• Show your passion for automation by making it a frequent topic of conversation... without being annoying. This is hard.

Mostly think about "how can I better advocate for higher quality and better process and more automation as part of that" rather than "how can I deal with this person's issues".

Answer 2

There is a concept called technical debt. It means that you have to pay later, with interest, if you "save" the effort now.

Technical debt is not all bad. Especially for a startup. If you need time-to-market now, or if there is a big trade fair, or if you are only capitalized for half a year anyway, it does not pay to spend weeks and months building the perfect software project to get really efficient a couple of years from now.

It is up to the management to make that call. But the technical folks must explain to them what is happening.

"I have this test case. Running it manually takes one hour. Automating it takes two working days. That means the automation will pay for itself a dozen releases from now. So tell me, are we going to automate it now, or later, or never?"

Answer 3

Go Agile.Take small steps.

I would suggest,at this point in time purely focus on manual testing and "test process".

Take small steps, small process improvements, sell its tangible benefits to the stakeholders.

Instead of simply saying "process is good", prove it.