Hello!
Well, I've been working for Gibe for seven months so it is certainly high time for me to say hello and write a post!
We have recently had a shift in our process to become more agile and transparent, this has been very helpful to my testing and in case there are any fellow testers reading this, I'd like to explain why.
Background
As tester for Gibe it is crucially important for me to be aware of project status, where we are the work flow, any changes/additions to the scope of work and who is looking after which issue written within our internal Jira system. Jira has been and continues to be incredibly helpful as a ticketing process for workflow but we have found that we wanted to try out a new more visible process and not have work lost in emails or online databases.
Our new workflow process has taken form of very colourful post-its on our white board to clearly and easily show what everyone is working on.
Each Monday morning we spend the first portion of the day discussing the work scheduled in for the week, talk through any problems, best outcomes/solutions, and decide together the scale of each task (each on a Post-it) before sticking these to the whiteboard in order of priority.
Following this we will then discuss for that day (and every day following) who is going to focus on what, how they hope complete the task and highlight anything which may be a hurdle.
How this helps
From a testing perspective this is all valuable information and the depth of all this information allows me to have greater understanding of each and every issue, the ability to discuss with the whole team my ideas (or concerns) for testing and therefore I am able to create better test data/tests.
As each Post-it is moved across the whiteboard I am able to see what is coming up in way of testing and this allows me to plan and prepare for the work about to arrive at my desk. The testing tickets are placed in my section again order of priority - the further up the board the more important the issue.
Then as I work through the tickets I either move them into the Done section at the end of the board (Hurrah!) or I need to move them back if there is more work to be done (Boo!).
The result
We did it! The board is (almost) cleared! Go team!
Like any business strategy change it's taken us all a little which to get used to but I feel like this is a good way for us to go to continue to create great websites for our great clients. I certainly feel more confident with my tests and as a company we are really pulling together and working harder
"Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision." Peter Drucker - saw this on my browser earlier and thought it was quite fitting!
Now after all that hard work I'm off to enjoy a beer in the sun!
