44
votes
Accepted
Asking a developer to be explicit about how a bug was fixed
I would operate under the assumption that your developers are documenting this somewhere, since I would also assume that they are good developers who care about good development practices. As a ...
- 2,679
36
votes
Accepted
Is % of escaped defects a good KPI for a tester performance?
In my personal opinion, I think this theory is flawed.
As you stated, there are so many variables that come into play:
% of escaped defects treat all bugs as equal, but they are not. Some bugs are ...
- 9,932
26
votes
Accepted
Who is responsible for pinpointing bugs?
If request sounds reasonable (which includes taking into account my other priorities), I would spend some more time researching.
If not reasonable, I will respond "sorry this is the best I can", and ...
19
votes
Accepted
How to deal with or prevent idle in the test team?
"there is nothing to test"
That is a strong statement.
I like to use James Bach's definition of testing:
Testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it
through exploration ...
- 10.5k
14
votes
Who is responsible for pinpointing bugs?
It depends.
As Joe Strazzere explained, it is a matter of discussion between devs and testers. The question is what factors to consider in such a discussion. I think Danny R. Faught explained that ...
- 10.5k
14
votes
Asking a developer to be explicit about how a bug was fixed
Request a meeting between upper management of QA and DEV and explain the goals of what you are asking. I think the description you provided in the question is a good start at explaining the why of the ...
- 288
13
votes
Is % of escaped defects a good KPI for a tester performance?
The short, simple answer: No
The slightly more nuanced answer: It can be, but you have to be very careful
The real explanation: Like most other candidates for tester performance KPIs, escaped ...
- 31.5k
13
votes
Accepted
What could a QA engineer do when a project is in an early stage?
If the product is at the MVP stage and your QA is just getting started, there's a problem. As a BA I saw this time and time again with dev vs QA where the dev team only got the BA to do testing when ...
- 7,082
11
votes
What could a QA engineer do when a project is in an early stage?
Are you aware that “70 to 85% of bugs in software are due to incomplete or inaccurate functional requirements?”
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking ...
- 5,552
10
votes
Accepted
Changing testing culture in the company
There has to be some sort of pain point to make Management and front-line employees aware of the need for testing. How your company does that depends on how mission or life-critical the software truly ...
- 1,011
10
votes
How to deal with or prevent idle in the test team?
In addition to some of the other suggestions, you could consider a few other options:
Build/run load tests for new/recent work (given the maturity of your test automation you may already have this ...
- 31.5k
9
votes
Who is responsible for pinpointing bugs?
Many companies I've worked for shared a policy...
...and that policy is:
Testers are free to consult with developers while attempting to characterize, isolate or reproduce anomalous behavior.
Once a ...
- 191
9
votes
Asking a developer to be explicit about how a bug was fixed
Most other answers suggest that requirement to be better in testing is understanding the code - but that requires skills what most QA testers do not possess. Deep understanding the code is not ...
8
votes
Accepted
What are the signs of an understaffed QA team?
I will answer this question with Agile iterations in mind. (An iteration could be a full Sprint or a single-user-story-cycle if you do Kanban or swarming.)
The QA department is understaffed when:
...
- 32.5k
8
votes
Accepted
Detecting observation skills during an interview
Great Question
As per my experience, it's very difficult to get a right employee who has very good judgment, sharp focus, attention & great observation skills.
Earlier it was very difficult to ...
- 5,611
7
votes
Defending corner cases
To expand on the other answers:
Note that something is a corner case - don't be afraid to note that an issue is a corner case and is being documented so that when a customer does encounter it, it's ...
- 31.5k
7
votes
Who is responsible for pinpointing bugs?
But, what are the general ways to avoid having or deal with such
conflicts keeping the relationship between the teams healthy and
productive?
Both QA management and Development management must ...
- 14.1k
7
votes
Asking a developer to be explicit about how a bug was fixed
It seems that this question has two answers depending on the qualities of your QA team.
If your QA team can read code, they can look at the commit(s) where the bugs are fixed - if you use a version ...
- 335
7
votes
Accepted
What can a candidate tester do to blow up an interview?
Oh boy! There is an interesting one.
Well apart from checking all the technical skills and blah blah, I always make sure to ask or observe two things about a candidate I am about to interview. And ...
- 3,532
7
votes
Accepted
Coping with an undersized QA team
I don't think your team is ridiculously understaffed. We run our operation more lean than you do.
In real life, ratio of developers to integration/system/functional automation testers is as low as ...
6
votes
Accepted
Code Review and part-time team members
First of all, whether a team member works part-time is irrelevant. Your team has a sprint backlog based on its velocity, which is variable for each sprint (dependent on team capacity for that sprint). ...
- 5,904
6
votes
Asking a developer to be explicit about how a bug was fixed
As a counterpoint to the many answers saying that testers can review the changes in source, I have worked in more than one place where testers have no access to source code. Their only source of ...
- 31.5k
6
votes
Asking a developer to be explicit about how a bug was fixed
I'm a developer, and I do add additional information in our bug/feature tracking system on completing an item whenever I think it might be useful. I target this mainly to testers, but much of the ...
- 211
6
votes
What could a QA engineer do when a project is in an early stage?
Although all observations are valid, from a project point of view, I am missing the motivational and learning point of view.
Starting some automation now can also be part of the learning of that ...
- 788
6
votes
Have test cases evaluated by everyone in the Scrum team? Including the developers?
Use tests to drive code design.
This is the difference between using tests as quality checks, post development instead of using tests to uncover and drive the design up-front.
"Testing by itself ...
- 25.2k
5
votes
Accepted
How to make management to accept major refactoring of the test codebase?
To add to Rsf's excellent answer:
You can't "make" management accept anything. You may be able to convince management that migrating your test codebase is a good idea. If you can demonstrate that a ...
- 31.5k
5
votes
New Hire: lack of documentation vs QA velocity
Assuming one cannot start as a "calm and relaxed horse", and we have only these two options, I would focus on starting to deliver as quickly as possible - at the end this is what you were hired to do. ...
- 11.4k
5
votes
Multiple product-specific QA teams vs a single generic QA team
Neither, QA should be part of the Agile delivery teams. I mean that the QA/Testers should sit with the developers and help them deliver tested features during their iterations.
Read some Agile ...
- 32.5k
5
votes
Accepted
Most productive onboarding for a new tester
If you can (given the constraints of technology and time zone), pair them with your existing QA specialists to do real work.
- 4,485
5
votes
What qualities and skills one must develop to project himself as a dynamic QA manager or Lead?
There are some qualities a QA Lead/manager should possess like
Determining, negotiating and agreeing on in-house quality procedures
Knowledge of standards and specifications
Customer ...
- 5,611
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible