My friend recently changed his job. He is a Software Tester in Telecom domain with good knowledge of things (Domain & Technology) and more importantly he is willing to learn, for him learning has no limits. And this is precisely the reason why I thought about sharing his story with you, as it concerns us all.
As we all know that whenever one switches his/her company, s/he has to first adjust to new working environment, new colleagues, new processes etc. Same happened with my friend as well. My friend was given a project / application to work on. The project didn’t have this QA function earlier and there were no documents available for my friend either. So question was where to start?
Well, a meeting was called with all the Stake holders and it was decided that the new joiner should undergo some Knowledge Sharing (KT-Knowledge Transfer) sessions to get some more knowledge about the product he will be working on. KT completed just after a single one hour session and my friend was asked to start writing test cases. The irony was, the person who gave this KT to my friend was also a new joiner and was a developer. For most of the questions asked by my friend, he didn’t have any answer and what can be the better excuse than saying “I am also new like you.”
Then somehow Test Case started coming in and there were hour of reviews by different stakeholders to get it correct. (Actually no one knew what is correct, as told by my friend.)Later my friend came to know that the test cases he prepared are to be used by some other team. That team will use these test cases for preparing Automated Scripts.
My friend wondered as he never did automation straightaway without executing at least one cycle manually just to make sure that application is stable enough to for automation. To worsen the matters, he had to conduct reverse KTs for that so called Automation Team to make them understand the functional flow of the Application Under Test.
My friend proactively offered a solution to his manager saying he can do a lot better job if given an opportunity to work on his own with a definite timeline. Manager partly agreed and party disagreed. Manager said, “You should focus on preparing test cases, leave automation to concerned team.” But at the same time, manager was also concerned with deliverables that were getting delayed because my friend (who was asked to just write test cases) was not just writing test cases, he was also executing, logging defects, attending calls, feeding automation team and exploring application under test all at the same time and these things remains unsaid but he has to do it.
This whole process required a lot of time and the result was neither test cases could be completed by my friend (who is still exploring the product to learn more about it) nor the automation team could completely prepare their scripts.
So, Who is responsible for all this delay? NO NO I should rather say What is responsible for this delay? My friend who was a Star Performer in his previous organization (because of his gifted skills in Testing and his hunger for knowledge) is a worried guy these days.
I could think of few reasons, I would request you to put few points from your experience as well.
1) Stakeholders should not have directly jumped onto automation to get more coverage; they should have first allowed my friend (a tester by destiny) to understand the application thoroughly.
2) If it was pre-planned that automation will be done by some other team, that team should also have participated in KT session. This would have reduced the Learning curve.
3) Taking parallel approach for automation and manual testing makes sense only when one knows what should be automated and what not that too when application is stable but not otherwise.
My take, stakeholders should think in long terms, consider the broader view. What do you think?
My friend is in need of your guidance, please share your thoughts.
