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How to Retain Software Testers and Keep a Happy QA Team

April 27, 2018 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

retain software testers

retain software testers

Your testers should be prized possessions at your organization — they are the advocates of quality who keep your brand aligned with stability, trust, and performance.

While you may not realize it, it’s also easy for them to feel undervalued for the work they do. But unless you want to go through the tedious task of hiring a new tester or forgoing a QA team altogether, it’s important to keep them happy.

It’s pretty simple as long as you value and respect your testers, but here are a few tips to support a culture they’ll never want to leave.

Give them the tools for success – Whether you’re Waterfall or Agile, fully manual or mostly automated, and iterating on a daily basis or a monthly basis, your testers depend on tools to help them effectively do their job. When you’re evaluating tools and frameworks, let your QA team have a say in the decision instead of pushing platforms that don’t work for them. Evaluate their strengths and needs during trialing — are they adept at Selenium, or will they benefit from a tool that has Record & Replay? Does the tool have integrations with the frameworks, plugins, and other tools they use on a regular basis? Asking these questions first means that testers will not only do their job better, they’ll also do it with satisfaction.

Provide professional development opportunities – When you have a limited QA team working next to other roles that have four times the number of people, it can make them feel like a small fish in a big pond. While the nature of the role means that they often only have a few other people on their team or may even be the sole tester, this doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for them to learn and grow from others in the industry. Encourage your team to attend software testing conferences, submit proposals, and attend other meetups that will allow them to network with others in their field. If you’re lucky, they’ll even bring some of these takeaways back with them and instill a learning culture to motivate better production practices.

Create an inclusive and collaborative work environment – Don’t make testers feel like the black sheep in your organization. Encourage them to speak up and share ideas. Testing isn’t just about breaking an application; an essential part of advocating for quality is actually using the details from their test sessions to impact change and provide insight about what’s working and what isn’t, whether that be in a sense of functionality or usability. Facilitate collaborative relationships with other roles so that testing isn’t something that done at the end of the development lifecycle. By creating open channels of communication between QA and the rest of the team, you’re also safeguarding the status of your application for release.

Recognize and reward – Testing is a humble job where a lot of vital work goes unrecognized. For many testers, the joy of finding a critical bug before deployment can be reward enough, but it’s also nice to get recognition once in a while. If you’re acknowledging the awesome features your developers are releasing, you should also be acknowledging the quality of the applications once they’re released. Make the effort to go out of your way and commend your QA team every once in a while — a little bit of appreciation goes a long way.

Don’t expect the world – Testers are often labeled the “gatekeepers of quality” but this is often an unfair assessment and expectation of their role. As much as they strive to catch every defect and test every part of the application, checking old code and exploring new features, it’s impossible to test every single scenario, and there will likely be a day that software is released and a bug slips by. Rather than pointing fingers at your QA team, realize that they have probably stopped hundreds more bugs in their tracks that you’ve never even known about

Happy Testing

Finding a good software tester isn’t always an easy task when they’re so high in demand, which is why is imperative that you create an environment that fosters happy testing and retains top talent.

Keeping your star employees doesn’t have to be rocket science, but it does require effort. By considering your testers skills, strengths, and successes, you can earn the loyalty of QA team who will help ensure that you’re releasing software with confidence.

Filed Under: Test Management Tagged With: hiring, management, professional development, software tester

How to Hire the Right Web Design Company

September 19, 2017 By Alex McPeak 2 Comments

Hiring a web design company

Hiring a web design company
When 57 percent of small businesses and 51 percent of tech companies outsource website and graphic design, it’s clear that the service is of high demand for hiring.

However, if you’re looking to hire someone to handle all things web design, there’s a good chance it’s because no one at your company knows much about web design. Just because you know how to hire a top-notch Ops engineer or a tester who’s the perfect culture fit doesn’t mean that handing your website over to an agency will be just as easy.

So, what should you look for when you go to hire a web design company? These tips will help you understand what to look for, what to consider, and what to ask before making a final decision.

When You Start Looking

First things first — you’ll need to ask the big ‘why.’ What is the business goal of your website redesign? If you don’t have that answer you’ll need to figure that out before you do anything else. Your goal may be to increase sales by 10 percent with a newly updated website. You can further break down that goal into the number of visitors and leads you will need to increase sales by percent.

Next, you need to know if you need to build a website from scratch or if you’re looking for a redesign. Does your startup need to launch a homepage that includes navigation with a product, about us, and blog page? Or, are you looking to revamp your current website and make it more mobile-friendly?

This distinction will be important when it comes time to hire a web design company and relay your vision. Either way, you’ll want to be able to communicate how many pages you need to be created or what you want to be changed.

You should ideally with some research to find a few examples of websites you like that align with what you’re looking for. Look around for the name of the designer or the company who made the site, or send a quick email to someone from the organization to inquire about their information and ask their thoughts about working with them. You’ll also want to save the websites you’re interested in so you can reference them when it comes time to work with your chosen designer.

Once you find a company, you’ll want to check out their full portfolio in order to decide whether or not they can do what you’re looking for. You may also want to keep in mind websites, features, and pages that you don’t like so your vision is clear and communicative when you begin the process of choosing a website design company.

What to Consider

Once you have a running list of companies you’re going to have to analyze their strengths and weaknesses a little closer to assess which is the best fit to do the job.

You don’t want a web designer who builds a site and leaves it alone for your users to find out whether it works or not once it’s “done”. If you’re investing in a design firm, they should have an immersive testing and QA process in place.

Do they evaluate the functionality of different features and perform usability testing? Do they run the website on different browsers and devices once the product is finished?

Pay individual attention to UI/UX details. Is it easy to use and navigate? Is it visually pleasing? Do they have a solid record for optimizing responsive design? The usability and user experience of your own website should be priorities of your website design.

Paying for a website that’s not properly tested will just mean you have to invest more time and money into that component of the process. Instead, a good web design company will include in-depth QA and follow-up support.

For example, LyntonWeb is an agency that focuses on designing modern websites that work to achieve your business goals by using a well-defined website design process to make all aspects of a website redesign are fully addressed.

Questions to Ask

  • What’s included in the service? – Maybe you think you’re just looking for a company to design your website, but you probably don’t realize there’s a lot more to it than that. Hiring a company that has an extensive knowledge around marketing tactics and SEO strategy, who can come up with a plan for content will prove to be of high value.
  • Do you have any case studies or customer testimonials I can refer to? A good company is more than just an impressive portfolio. You want an understanding of how well they work with their customers straight from the source. If a website looks nice, but it isn’t what the customer wanted or didn’t fulfill all requests, you might want to rethink working with that agency.
  • Do you have any hard figures to back up some of your results? Did site traffic increase? Did bounce rate decrease? Have sessions gotten longer or shorter? Analytics will help you understand whether the company’s redesign helped meet inbound marketing goals.
  • What does the company look like? How many people work at the company? How many people work on each project? What are the different roles? Do most people work remote or in office? Who will be managing this project? You want to make sure you’re working with a team whose culture and mission aligns with your own.
  • What’s the design, development, and implementation process? Have your potential hire walk you through their design plan so you can familiarize yourself with their ideas. Where do they start? How will they come up with a design, implement it, and maintain it? What about afterward? Will your team have access to content? Will the company keep up with website maintenance? You want to make sure everyone is on the same page.
  • What’s the communication like between the client and the company? What information do they gather before, during, and after design to ensure they’ll be able to fulfill your vision? You want the agency to check in with your needs and make sure they’re on track to complete all requirements, not just take a rough idea and run with it with no communication. You should both be working together throughout the process to establish goals, wishes, and requirements — that way you won’t run into the awkward dilemma of disliking the first design.
  • What’s your experience with responsive design and how do you ensure quality? Again, if the company just hands you a finished design with no testing, you will quickly experience issues. Make sure that whoever you hire knows how to design a responsive website, test it across browsers, and ensure it’s fully-functional before launching it.

Choosing a web design company can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be a shot in the dark. In fact, if you take the proper steps, it should be pretty clear which one is the right choice for your brand, company, and team. By assessing what you want your website to look like, researching your options, and communicating with the designers throughout the process, you’re almost guaranteed work with a great company who will give you a website you’re happy with.

Filed Under: Design Tagged With: hiring, web designer, web designer company

Why Your Startup Needs Software Testing

August 7, 2017 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

Software testing for startups

Software testing for startups

The need for a software testing in large companies to protect security, functionality, and other components that can make or break their customers’ trust is obvious. Oftentimes, the focus is so large on testing that enterprises have entire teams of testers employed at different skill levels and specializing in different areas.

But for startups that have a minimal budget for development, nonetheless testing, why should budding businessmen invest in software testers? It may seem like a step that could be skipped without causing much impact, however, entrepreneurs that have been in similar situations know the truth isn’t that simple.

The ROI

Why does software testing matter to a startup? With so many other expenses being extended in sales, marketing, and day-to-day operations at a time where you’re probably just trying to break even, spending limited finances on another department may not seem very strategic at first.

However, there’s a big reason you’ll want a tester on your team, and that reason is quality.

While a few bugs early on in your software’s first years in the public eye might not seem like a huge deal, software defects are known to be costly when they make it past product release. In fact, it’s about 30 times more expensive to fix a bug after release than in design.

Debugging after a user has already noticed a problem is not just expensive, but it’ll cost you in productivity, reputation, and consumer trust as well, which is not something you can afford to lose with so few customers who are closely evaluating what your product has to offer them.

Instead, focusing on releasing high-quality software will create brand loyalty and help you stand out against competitors, making earning and retaining new customers much more attainable.

Hiring Software Testers

You may be asking that if you have a developer who clearly knows how to code and debug software, why do you need to hire a dedicated software tester? Why can’t your developer just test the software?

The biggest reason why having a developer test their own software is problematic is that they’re already so familiar with the application that it’s hard for them to act as an end-user and handle it in a way that it’s not made for.

On the other hand, the job of the tester is to test the limits of an application the way a user might. For example, since the developer built the application, they know how the checkout process is supposed to work and might not think to enter an invalid email like a tester would.

Since testers also have the technical knowledge and know the in’s and out’s of software development, their insight provides a highly accurate approach to the quality of software before it’s released. Developers and testers have two different skill sets, and each should be utilized for the job they’re best at in order to create a seamless software development life cycle.

Also, since developers obviously spend a lot of their time actually coding, it doesn’t provide them much time to be testing, too — or at least not as much as they should be. At the very least, there should always be one tester working alongside the developer to make sure appropriate testing can be done on the software at different stages of development and at every integration.

Additionally, if you’ve been hearing a lot about automated testing and think it may be a resource to replace actually hiring a human tester, you’d be sadly mistaken. Automated tests are great for following commands and pre-written tests, but won’t be able to find problems in unexplored regions of the software. This means that in order to do any testing, manual or automated, you’ll have to have a human that knows how to write tests.

The Tests Your Startup Should Be Doing

Below are the few of the different testing methods you’ll want to be doing, even at a startup:

Exploratory Testing

For a new application, exploratory testing is extremely important for laying a groundwork of quality. Exploratory testing is an ad-hoc process where the tester manually goes through the software in an attempt to find bugs.

Again, not just anyone can properly execute effective exploratory testing as there is usually a strict process and specific guidelines to follow. Exploratory testing is largely used to define and evaluate the usability of the app as a customer would experience it, and having an expert manually test the app is the best way to evaluate components like functionality and usability.

Regression Testing

Testing is not a one-off process — you can’t just run one test and be able to release new iterations whenever you want from then on. In fact, every time a change is made to the code, you’re going to want to run a regression test to make sure it hasn’t broken previously functioning features.

This is a great example of where you might have to utilize both manual and automated testing. Doing the same test over and over will take up a big chunk of time, so automation is usually a preferred way to compliment manual efforts. On the other hand, manually creating a test script and running it is necessary before automating regression tests. Either way, regression tests are important to make sure a bug doesn’t pop up after adding a new feature.

Performance Testing

When thinking about quality, fast performance is one of the best ways to establish a loyal user, but bad performance will just as quickly turn potential users away. When a 2-second delay in load time during a transaction results in abandonment rates of up to 87 percent, those are losses that you can’t afford.

You want to make sure your application loads quickly and can handle expected traffic. This is the best way to avoid frustrating your users and prevent them from leaving your website before they make it to check out.

Responsive Design

One of the most crucial details that can easily go un-examined without having a software tester that knows what to look for is the idea of responsive design.

Your website will most likely be accessed from an array of different devices and browsers — desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones on Chrome, Safari, or even the looming Internet Explorer. Gone untested, the user experience may be drastically different on each of these configurations, which isn’t a good thing.

One of the worst things you can do is go without optimizing your application for mobile devices — the web page simply won’t survive. Finding a tester who knows the importance of cross-browser testing and knows how to find inconsistencies in responsive design will be one of the most valuable assets your startup could invest in.

Conclusion

It’s pretty simple — when you’re a new player in the game, quality is what’s going to set your apart. Don’t make the mistake of skimping out of testing your product to save money because, in the end, it’ll probably cost you customers.

Hiring testers will ensure that someone is monitoring potential issues and catching bugs before release. While it’s nearly impossible to prevent every bug, having a testing strategy in place creates a safeguard to affect better software and happier customers.

Filed Under: Test Management Tagged With: automated testing, hiring, manual testing

Expert Advice for Hiring Your First Operations Team

March 24, 2017 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

Hiring your first operations team

Hiring your first TechOps team

If your business relies on software, there may come a time where you realize the need to start hiring your first Operations team. You could be putting this task off because there’s enormous pressure to pick the perfect team that will propel your company forward, but you don’t want to risk making the wrong hiring decision. Or, you simply might not know what to look for in the first place.

Whether you’re in the early stages of a startup or you’re a well-established company experiencing growing pains, there are a multitude of circumstances where an Operations team could be the answer to your problems. By picking up insights from DevOps recruitment pros and studying best practices for hiring in the industry, you can better prepare to add essential members to your growing organization and team.

What is Operations and When Do You Need It?

Operations is responsible for how software works. That means that they’re the ones who are ensuring that the customer is always being delivered an exceptional experience, which includes owning quality, consistency, operability, impact on internal teams, availability, and balancing other requirements.

This means that an Operations team is often essential when security and reliability is a priority, or there’s specific “hard operational problem” in the infrastructure.

Honeycomb Co-founder Charity Majors gave an excellent presentation for the Heavybit Speaker Series all about hiring an Ops team. While she acknowledged the importance of an Operations team in certain situations, she also advanced that, depending on where your business is at, it’s not always the right direction.

“There are a lot of places out there that think they need traditional operations engineers, when all they really need is someone to really care about their infrastructure,” said Majors. “You should have genuinely hard operations problems before you even start looking to hire engineers.”

Sometimes, a Development team may be able to answer these problems, and sometimes, you have to hire Operations. However, it’s essential to consider the individual needs of your business to assess where there are gaps in production that need to be met before making the decision to hire a whole Ops team.

Distinguishing DevOps and Hiring for Skills

Traditionally, there was a divide between Development and Operations. Recently, however, the conjunction of the two under the term “DevOps” has been in the spotlight because of the shift towards Agile development and test automation.

Many industry experts, however, will tell you that “there’s no such thing as a DevOp,” and some people are still debating the actual definition of a DevOps engineer. Neverless, Ernest Mueller posed a good description of DevOps on Agile Admin:

“DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service life cycle, from design through the development process to production support.”

Basically, DevOps should echo Agile principles and resource the complimentary skills of both Development and Operations functions when building, delivering, and maintaining software.

When thinking about the differences between Development and Operations in this sense, Sean Hull suggests that their primary skill sets and focuses simply differ. Developers are responsible for programming new features, rapid prototyping, and development, while TechOps compliment this by enforcing the longevity of data, and the consistency and durability of it when large-scale operational problems come arise.

“In a lot of small startups, the initial phase is obviously on building a product […] and not surprisingly, you hire a lot of developers,” said Hull.

“As you grow you may find the operational tasks that are defaulting to one or more developers are taking more and more of their time. As your customer base grows and you’ve seen your first few spikes, it’s time to start thinking about hiring for a real Ops role.”

However, Majors points out that people should be careful of isolating the two roles into silos and following the stereotype that Operations teams are only interested in stability and durability while Development only works on solutions and features.  Everyone as a whole should be supporting the the progress of a project as well as the outcomes associated with operations.  Within well-oiled DevOps teams, all contributors should be interested in delivering quality software, driving innovation, and solving problems.

Hull also enforces the idea that when you’re hiring anyone under for Operations, you need to be searching for a specific skill set. While you probably want this person to posses skills in automation  and programming, you’re also looking to approach specific operational problems and fill the gaps in your existing development strategy, so being precise is important when crafting a job description.

While you do want someone who has a breadth of knowledge, you don’t want someone who has amateur skills in everything. Instead, you want someone who has strengths that you’re already looking for to ensure a stable infrastructure while committing to company-wide collaboration.

Stress Communication and Empathy

CEO of LogicMonitor, Kevin McGibben shared that at TechBeacon, only about 10 percent of employees are in Operations. This is because having a close-knit and collaborative Operations team is going to be much more effective than having a large, disjointed one.

“Five 9s, or 99.999 percent uptime, is a requirement in our business,” McGibben informed.

You need a team that can work together to balance strengths and bounce strategies off each other in order to have a successful organization. They also need to be fully invested in the success of their projects and the organization.

“The best Ops engineers understand their impact on the function and value of the product they deploy to customers,” McGibben said. “They understand the consequences of operational degradation (or downtime) on customer experience and business.”

Since Operations can be a very high-impact area, it’s crucial that teams are invested in their own accountability in this way. To this point, Tom Hart, VP of Operations at VictorOps, has also stated the importance of a strategic, committed team.

“Over the years, I’ve found that productive and successful Operations teams (“the 99.999 percent” crowd) are centered on establishing and maintaining a positive culture of communication and collaboration, coupled with a tangible sense of ownership in the success (or, failure) of their organization,” Hart said.

Look For Someone Who Enjoys a Challenge… and Challenge Them

The most successful Operations team is going to be one who is always interested in learning new things and thinks that solving problems is what makes work fun.

“From my experience, it comes down to this: If you don’t like dealing with people during difficult circumstances (many of which are circumstances you and your technology created!), you should not be in Operations,” Hart said.

Additionally, the retention of your Operations team is just as important as the onboarding. You’re hiring a whole team of people who enjoy a challenge and do their best work when they’re challenged, so it’s important to keep your Operations team engaged and excited to work.

“You’re not really going to ever attract the top tier talent unless you are offering real, hard, challenging problems of reliability or scale,” said Majors. “I think there’s no question that investing in your people is always the winning strategy.”

Filed Under: Test Management Tagged With: devops, hiring, techops

7 Things to Consider Before Hiring a Software Tester

March 17, 2017 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

how to hire a QA team hiring a software tester
Hiring a test team

How do you hire your testers?

So, you’ve finally decided you need to start the process of hiring a software tester. We’re very excited for you. There are, however, a few steps you should follow before you settle on a final decision and extend an offer, and we have a few tips on how you can make the best hire.

    1. First Thing’s First. The first thing that you should look out for is whether or not the person you’re considering has any errors in their resume. While this should be a given for any job or position, it’s especially crucial in industries where an attention to detail is essential to your job (a.k.a. testing). If the person in question used the wrong “your vs you’re” or spells the company name wrong, they’re probably not going to notice a small, discreet bug.
    2. Know what you want. Are you expecting this person to do a lot of manual testing, or are you looking more for an automation engineer? Are you transitioning to an agile methodology? What’s the company’s preferred coding language? While many qualified testers will come and go, you want someone who is going to be right for the specific jobs and projects you need completed. It’s not just about hiring a software tester, it’s about finding the right one.
    3. Do they know the basics? Can they explain functional testing? What’s the difference between unit and integration testing? Have they ever coded before? While you shouldn’t expect your interviewee to be giving exact dictionary definitions, they should be able to convince you that they know what they’re talking about and are familiar with the software development and testing industry.
    4. Ask about their process. Giving your potential new tester scenarios and asking them how they’d go about finding bugs or how they’d get rid of them is a more in-depth way to assess their testing knowledge. It’ll also give you a more expansive insight into their work style and help you recognize if they’ll be the right fit for the jobs that you need them to do.
    5. Test them. You can challenge someone to define testing terms all day long, but the evidence lies in how well someone can actually execute that test in real life. Whether you have them complete an assignment before you meet, in-person at the interview, or request that they complete one at home afterwards, having them perform a coding or testing job will give a more accurate understanding of their skills, method, and technique. This is also a good way to evaluate how much effort they’re willing to put in. A senior tester that makes sloppy mistakes should be re-considered if you have a junior tester that took the request seriously and clearly put more time and energy into the task.
    6. Have they worked as part of a team? You might find the perfect candidate with years of experience who checks all the boxes. However, being a tester isn’t always a one-person job. Keep in mind that the person you hire will have to regularly collaborate with various people on your team, from designers and programmers to management, engineers, and other testers. Even the best tester will be potentially damaging to your organization’s goals if they are unwilling to take feedback and work with others. You want to make sure they fit the company and not just the job description.
    7. Are they interested in the job? You need to know what you want from your candidates, but they need to be invested in the opportunity, as well. Do they seem interested in the projects they’ll be assigned and eager to bring new testing strategies to your QA game? Your new tester should be willing to learn and be invested in the development process. Make sure that either way the person is in for the long haul and is going to be an asset to your objectives.

Hiring a software tester is a great opportunity to grow your company, learn new testing methods, improve current procedures and advance the efficiency of your software development strategy. In this way, it’s essential to the success of your organization, your product and your team that you put careful time and thought into the job offer.

Image by สุวรรณา วิเศษแก้ว via Wikimedia Commons

Filed Under: Test Automation Tagged With: hiring, software testing

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