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 ...
c32hedge's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Yu Zhang's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Peter M. - stands for Monica's user avatar
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 ...
João Farias's user avatar
  • 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 ...
dzieciou's user avatar
  • 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 ...
JeffC's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Kate Paulk's user avatar
  • 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 ...
corsiKa's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Vishal Aggarwal's user avatar
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 ...
Jerry Penner's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Kate Paulk's user avatar
  • 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 ...
MrWonderful's user avatar
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 ...
Peter M. - stands for Monica's user avatar
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: ...
Niels van Reijmersdal's user avatar
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 ...
Nitin Rastogi's user avatar
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 ...
Kate Paulk's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Joe Strazzere's user avatar
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 ...
Renzeee's user avatar
  • 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 ...
demouser123's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Peter M. - stands for Monica's user avatar
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). ...
FDM's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Kate Paulk's user avatar
  • 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 ...
aschepler's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Ray Oei's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Michael Durrant's user avatar
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 ...
Kate Paulk's user avatar
  • 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. ...
alecxe's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Niels van Reijmersdal's user avatar
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.
Dale Emery's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Nitin Rastogi's user avatar

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