Just like New Year’s resolutions, it’s easy to give up on driving changes in software testing and QA because of a lack of short-term success. Isn’t it time we changed this mindset—and started focusing on the journey as well as the destination?
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Allow me to propose a radical idea: pick one thing you want your testing team to do better and drive the change until its accomplished |
You’ve got to love January. As soon the New Year’s revelry (and recovery) subsides, most of us kick into high gear on self-improvement. For a lot of us, that drive extends into our professional lives as well—which probably helps to explain why so many of us in the software testing and QA industry look to this time of year to drive changes in our organizations.
Yet, by the middle of February, many of those changes will be abandoned. Just like our own personal resolutions, we’ll revert back to the same old habits we vowed so fervently to correct.
Why does this happen? Well, everyone has their theories, but most tend to echo one similar refrain: we try to do too darn much at once.
Just think about it: a goal of losing 50 pounds is really the culmination of a number of dietary, exercise, and lifestyle changes over an extended period of time. But if you only defined “success” by losing all the weight, it would be easy to get frustrated and discouraged. Conversely, if you broke that goal into smaller, more manageable objectives, like losing 2.5 pounds a week or exercising every other day, you’d be far more likely to reach your ultimate goal because the success of achieving those smaller “milestones” was constantly driving you in the right direction.
This is how you should be leading change in your software testing and QA organization. Always keep an eye on what your ideal future state is; but understand that improvement lies in the journey—and not the destination.
So allow me to propose a radical idea: pick one thing you want your testing team to do better and drive the change until its accomplished. Maybe you want to know each of your testers’ strengths and weaknesses (we can help with that!) or perhaps your looking to assess your entire QA organization as a whole (we can do that too!). Whatever it is, make it specific, make it actionable, and make it happen.
Over time, those small wins will start to result in measurable improvement. In turn, you can use that as evidence to fund larger transformational initiatives later on down the road (like implementing a testing center of excellence with our True North Testing Methodology). The important thing is getting the ball rolling. It’s much harder to stop once you already have momentum.
And no matter the task, even if it’s just a little advice, we’re here to help. After all, resolutions are far more resolute when they’re a team effort.
Cheers,
Mike Hodge
Lighthouse Technologies, Inc.
Software Testing | Quality Assurance Consulting | Oracle EBS Consulting
