With the outbreak of COVID-19, organizations around the globe are promoting remote work. Most likely, organizations had not worked with a completely distributed team previously. For QA teams, who usually share offices, there are more challenges to managing their work. Often, managers come across questions like how to monitor a team’s testing efficiency when working remotely? Or how to keep a track record of testing processes that distributed QA teams work on? Or how to ensure that teams working in different time zones are not affecting the quality of their testing efforts?
According to experts, managing distributed QA teams require setting achievable goals, using collaborative test management tools, smooth communication, and leveraging the QA team’s strengths. Although all these factors sound manageable, it is still a huge challenge to manage distributed testing teams.
Why Hire Global and Diverse Teams?
As remote work offices become common, organizations realize that global and diverse teams can be beneficial to a company’s success. Gartner has predicted that by 2022, 75% of businesses with diverse frontline decision-makers will improve their financial situation. However, besides all the benefits of a diverse global team, companies are still struggling to make these teams achieve success across different time zones.
Test Management Tools – Improve Collaboration
QA teams are often in a habit of using Excel sheets or legacy tools to manage their testing. In some organizations, team members use different testing tools, which entails issues like version control, compatibility, and restricted access. However, these issues can be dealt with, by using a modern test management tool. QA managers need to pick a sophisticated tool that can also integrate with other tools such as Jira, Jenkins, etc. When QA teams are not located in the same time zone, they may face certain issues while testing. A typical example of this can be if a QA tester has accessed a certain test case in a repository from a test management tool, and the project status is still not updated, chances of errors are high. Whereas, a modern test management tool will ensure that all stakeholders, regardless of their locations, will access the same file, at the same time.
For instance, agile QA teams using Kualitee can ensure improved collaboration with all stakeholders and deliver faster. It can help QA experts design QA Processes better across multiple locations by enhancing their test management efforts. It is essential that a test management tool should be accessible not just by testers but all stakeholders so that they can view project status, quality metrics, and utilize its reporting capabilities.
In wake of the current global situation, and to address business needs with a diversified QA team, it becomes important for managers to pick the right platforms to make the most of the QA team’s software testing efforts. Organizations that fear deterrence in faster releases should focus on utilizing technology, valuable tools, and resources available at their disposal.
