Establish an efficient test team

I spoke to a friend who recently worked as a test manager about the construction of their department. Just as he started his head, the manager was so impatient: "The work in the Department is really hard to carry out, and the employees have no strength ......" "A Certain employee is helpless and always takes care of things ......" "A certain employee is really anxious. She has been in the company for three years and is familiar with her business. If you want to promote her, she just doesn't make progress, she will be panicked when she does something she has never done before. "" The old employees are all dead, and new employees are not motivated ......" "XX is about to resign recently. I don't know what's going on. I always thought he was enjoying his work ......". After more than half an hour of complaints, he was still immersed in his own pain.

To be honest, I really sympathize with him and his current situation. As a new test Manager, there will naturally be a great deal of effort to make the Department look new overnight ......, Unfortunately, Rome was not built in one day, and the problem of Department management would never be solved so easily.

Management is an art, and management of test teams is an art that requires caution. Test engineers are generally sensitive and self-respecting. They have the ability to discover defects, and naturally they can easily discover your negligence in management; they can evaluate the application system, it is not difficult for them to evaluate your management work.

So, is it really difficult to establish an efficient test team? In fact, the core of the management work is "people". As the head of the testing department, as long as we seize this point, we can smoothly mobilize the entire team. I have experienced different test teams in different companies. In my opinion, test engineers are actually very easy to get along. Test engineers are not purely technical personnel. Generally, they are keen, patient, responsible, able to withstand work pressure, and have good communication skills. However, the "test engineer", collectively referred to as "test engineers", masks too many differences between them.

Back to ourArticleIn the first example, I asked the new test Manager, "What do you think your ideal test engineer looks like ?" In this case, he replied, "I hope they can all be motivated, enterprising, highly technical, and at the same time be under pressure ." I think his answer may be to ask all the test engineers in the Department for their own requirements. A team full of generals will never be more effective than a team with clear division of labor and efficient collaboration.

So how can we build an efficient test team? This issue must be a question of "benevolent and wise. But here, I am not taking the liberty to come up with my own opinions.

1Persons in the test team"

First, an efficient test team needs "persons" with different roles ". According to my experience, there are usually some employees in the testing team:

1.1Different types of employees

LTiger

Tigers in the testing department are energetic and aggressive people. They are smart, competent, sharp, and not afraid of pressure. Every test Manager I have met is expected to find such talents. Unfortunately, such talents are rare. In addition, most of such talents are developed by the test organization, A "foreign" tiger may not be able to exert its power in a new organization.

However, even if a tiger exists in the department, you must create a suitable space for the tiger. Many test managers will be troubled by the departure of the team members, but have you ever wondered why he is leaving? Purely for salary? -In fact, the tiger is very motivated. Once he finds that he can only do fixed things in a fixed environment, he will choose to leave. To retain this type of talent, you must create a challenging environment for him at all times-let him explore the world and let other roles "Shoucheng", which is most likely the most appropriate combination.

LNiu

Niu is the most diligent, steadfast, hardworking, and dedicated is the best portrayal of Niu. Such an employee can complete the explicit tasks you give him, and it is the most reassuring to give him clear tasks. However, in the United States, such employees tend to lack active creativity. Obviously, they are familiar with their business and have rich experience, but once they need to jump out of their work atmosphere and roles, if they do some work creatively, they will be helpless. This type of employee is so loving and hateful that he is diligent and hard-working.

LMonkey

Monkeys are synonymous with Intelligence. Employees of this type are smart, bold, and active. In the department, such employees are always engaged in a variety of new tools, new technologies, new terms. They are the main advocates of tool introduction and the main advocates of new technology adoption. These employees are enthusiastic about new things and are willing to understand every new things they can touch. These employees are naturally interested in solving puzzles. Their greatest interest is to find evidence that they are smart from systems like mysteries. However, the disadvantages of such employees are almost as obvious as the advantages-lack of perseverance, once they have to do some repetitive work for a long time (for example, manual regression testing ), they will show impatience and errors caused by negligence.

LGiraffe

The giraffe is not a synonym for "slowness" here. A giraffe is usually the most forward-looking person in a department. They have an in-depth understanding and understanding of software testing and can provide very good suggestions (not just opinions) for the development of the testing department. The only problem is that, they always lack attention to the details and can provide beautiful flowcharts or proposals. However, if they are responsible for implementation, it must be a disaster.

LFox

There will also be some tricky people in the testing department. We can call them "foxes ". Employees of the Fox type always look the busiest in the entire department-they take the next and next job for themselves, but use one job to conceal the ineffective work invested in another job. Whenever you ask such employees,AHow is things going ?", They always use "I'm busyBThings (orCSuch an answer will block you. The final result is that after several months of busy work, they may not get any effective work results.

LMole

Of course, this type of employees may not be seen. They never want to wake up, but most of the time they see their stunned eyes. Any job assigned to him may fail without reason. What's more terrible is that they rarely learn from failure.

For these different types of employees, it is important not to change their personality types, but to understand their personality types and assign different jobs to them based on their personality types, it enables them to work in an environment where they can smoothly display themselves and make themselves forward.

1.2Countermeasures for different types of employees

LTiger-Challenge him and give him the most important and difficult work of the Department. You only need to give full play to his initiative and regularly let him report on the progress of his work. The safest way to make a tiger feel is to allow him to fully prove his abilities. Of course, it is important to note that if a team has several tigers, it may be a good idea to allocate their work reasonably (responsible for different aspects.

LNiu -- let him do what he is best. Niu will be happy to be able to develop in a certain aspect until he becomes an expert in business or implementation. It is most advantageous for the Organization to let him take over the work scope developed by the tiger. Of course, Niu sometimes asks for some "Challenges". At this time, it is best to prepare a retreat for him.

LMonkey: the best candidate for new technology research in the department. There is no way to rely on monkeys in testing automation, testing tool introduction, new testing methods, and testing technology introduction. However, the biggest risk is their uncertainty and optimism. Therefore, if you want them to lead a project (for example, a test tool to introduce a project ), ask them to report their work progress more frequently and plan details for them.

LGiraffe-adviser. When planning the development of a department, you can listen to them more, but it is best not to let them take full responsibility for the task of improving the Department's testing process. In terms of implementation, they may not take too much care of the details.

LFox -- remove the "multi-task" He used to hide himself ". Clearly give him a task, such as "completing a project test", always pay attention to their reports during the task process. Once they find that they take the initiative to undertake tasks that are not their own, they should analyze them immediately, check whether they have made the same mistake.

LMole -- what do you say? Give him a chance. It may be that he does not really love this job, or he has some psychological flaws that have not been solved. In any case, find out the cause of his poor performance. If there is really no way to change his job, it is likely that he can only choose to leave the current team.

1.3Tacit understanding of team members

No test team can rely on one person to succeed. success must be the result of joint efforts. It is very difficult to establish a successful team in a short time, because you must learn about each team member according to the Department plan, train them, and re-train when necessary.

However, for various reasons, it is impossible for a team to remain in the initial state, with old members leaving and new members joining the team. The team size may change, and the team's responsibilities may also change. So how can we keep a team relatively successful while making these changes? The answer is "tacit understanding ".

A team must rely on the system to establish such tacit understanding. For example, the establishment of regular communications between employees, mandatory training and receiving mechanisms, regular rotation of personnel, backup of positions and roles, and so on. There is no rule to follow in this regard. Everyone can establish a system based on the characteristics of their own team. However, only in this way can the results and development of the Team be fixed in some form.

2"Rules" and "atmosphere" of the test team"

In addition to personnel, the most important thing is the "Rules" of the team, that is, the standard soil for the survival of the team. The combat capability of a team is more reflected in the "forbidden by the line". Therefore, for a successful test team, a clear division of roles and clear team rules must be established.

In addition, the "atmosphere" is also an important factor for the test team. The atmosphere of the test team is a kind of feeling. An efficient test team must have a good atmosphere.

2.1Learning and communication atmosphere

An efficient team must be a continuous learning team. Each test engineer in the test team will have his own plans for the future and want to learn more knowledge and skills from the team. The efficient team relies on everyone in the team to achieve the "efficient" goal, and each team member is required to have good skills. Therefore, the learning atmosphere is essential to an efficient test team.

However, it is not easy to build a learning organization. An organization cannot take learning as a task, so learning must be combined with work. In addition, how to mobilize the "experts" in the organization to drive the "Temporarily unavailable" learning is required, it is also very skillful.

LDepartment Instructor System

The Department lecturer system is a relatively effective system. In my practice, Department lecturers are both rights and responsibilities: "department lecturers" certification is a necessary condition for obtaining the "senior test engineer" level. At the same time, to retain the "department Lecturer" certification, you must ensure that at least4Internal courses within hours, and internal courses are evaluated more than average8Points.

In addition, the "best internal Lecturer" of the year is selected each year, and internal lecturers are re-certified each year. Internal lecturers are given priority to external communication opportunities, these further turn internal lecturers into an honor, so that more members are willing to contribute their knowledge and experience to the entire team.

LSpecial Research

Test engineers all know that one of the worst ways to get involved in testing is "event-driven"-test engineers are busy handling temporary emergencies all day long, the improvement of skills and the long-term goal of the Department are ignored. Once this state continues, inertia will be formed, and members of the test team will easily get bored and tired, and lose their goals and directions, this lack of goals and directions can easily affect the morale of the entire team and lead to the loss of personnel.

In my work, I will adopt a "Special Study" Guidance Method. In fact, there are a lot of research and improvement work that can be done in the test team. We can take advantage of the "Intermittent" feature of the test work, conduct some targeted research work when it is not very tight. The topic approach is used for research because it is necessary to determine the objectives of the study. Otherwise, it is easy to ignore the guidance that the research work has no goals. In addition, do not set too many topics for such special studies. It is best to see topics with certain results in a short time.

LSummary atmosphere

Summing up your work in a timely manner is a very good opportunity to improve personal and organizational capabilities. We must establish such an "focusing on summing up" atmosphere within the Organization. To sum up, we should not only describe what we have done, but, more importantly, summarize the gains and losses-"We are doing this job./What is in the project? Where are mistakes? Can we do better ?" The purpose of the summary is not to punish a person, but to allow team members to see their achievements and deficiencies in their work, and to summarize the appropriate places to form processes or specifications, so as to improve their abilities and organizational abilities.

2.2Build a team's combat capability using systems and processes

LSystem process first

"No rules, not a square ". An efficient testing team must also be a well-disciplined team. Every new employee in our team is not the first to learn business knowledge and test skills, but to learn our testing process and work standards in one month, these are the most direct experiences of the team.

LKnowledge is not only for individuals, but also for teams.

Personnel switching is normal for the test team, but regardless of personnel changes, the test team must be able to ensure that the team will not work properly due to the departure of a person. We mentioned the concept of "backup by personnel", except for "backup by personnel, it is also necessary to ensure that personnel experience and knowledge can be converted into team knowledge and experience in a timely manner through certain regulations.

ØThe project summary system ensures that the experience of project members can be reflected in the experience of the Organization at the end of each test project;

ØThe "department Instructor System" Enables individual (Lecturer) skills and knowledge to become the team's knowledge and skills through text and language;

Finally, building an efficient test team is not an easy task, but it is definitely not"Mission Impossible", As long as the team's managers can manage" people "and" systems "and create a good" atmosphere ", I believe that every manager can create a distinctive and successful and efficient team.