Test Engineers already are great and do their best to keep bugs and defects aways from products and services. Here are some tips I have learnt over the years that will just help them to be better. If you already know them then make sure you tell them to a Test Engineer you meet/talk with to make him/her also succeed.
So here are the tips:
- In daily scrums just don't listen the updates but think what you have on your plate for the day. Make it clear if something is ambiguous.
- Adding a leaked defect to test suite does not help alone. A post-mortem of the cause of defect leakage for sure does.
- Integrate Test Reporting with IMs for instant and hassle free report viewing.
- Create bugs for any doubtful functionality or behavior.
- Be proactive in communicating problems, achievements etc.
- Estimate story points for each Testing Ticket so that you get ample time to test it.
- Before automating or testing make sure your test data is accurate and can be prepared easily when needed. First apply effort in making test data creation faster and reliable.
- Always communicate the test coverage to all stakeholders regularly.
- Discuss with senior engineers and leads out of your immediate team also to find out ways to improve processes, tests, infrastructure etc.
- Make a point to learn one new thing per day.
- Be bold and speak out any thing that needs to be known to the team or stakeholders.
- Build documentation with the code in form of inline statements etc.
- Take opportunities to mentor new team members.
- Remember planning and strategizing is always welcome even if the time provided is minimal. Prioritization can make your life much easier here.
- Fast and close communication with Devs is the fastest way to get a bug resolved.
- Think retrospectives as the time when you are playing judge of the process/project and have to suggest improvements and tell about shortcomings fluently.
- Give advance notice of personal time off etc for team to plan ahead.
- Mark your absence as "OOO" next to your name in present day messaging systems like Slack, Hipchat etc.
- Create personal notifiers or bots that notify you when something related to your area of expertise is being talked about at Instant Messaging Systems.
- Enjoy and do team outings! Make Testing Fun!
