I’ll admit I’m skeptical about outsourcing testing activities (whether nearshore or offshore). For me, testing and everything around it involves a lot of communication, and I like that communication to be direct, personal and ongoing. There is one related thought, though, that I find all the more interesting: how we handle our time and the things that really matter, in the project, in testing and in private life. Time wasters are everywhere once you start looking. Pay attention and you will spot
- test analysts who prepare test data by copying hundreds of records from one table to another by hand: click,
Ctrl+C, click,Ctrl+V, click,Ctrl+C, click,Ctrl+V, …, - project managers who fiddle endlessly with heading styles in Word (the first warning sign is usually page breaks “designed” with a row of blank lines) or
- test managers who spend days polishing test reports on tests they were never really involved in.
They all have one thing in common: they could be spending their time on something more important. The reason for “keeping busy” with these unimportant things may be not knowing any better, or it may be a more or less conscious choice. Either way, the time and money that sometimes go up in smoke here call for action. So what can you do? Looking at myself and my colleagues, I have found three options that work: automate, learn and delegate. I consider all three whenever I notice that I, my testers, colleagues or anyone else is “keeping busy”. Here are a few ideas as examples.
Automate Routine Tasks
In software development of all places, every option is open to us. Migrating test data is quick work for a script. Even with built-in tools or free ones such as a macro recorder, Automator or various capture/replay tools, you can get a lot of the small stuff done fast. And the expertise is easy to find in the team or the project. Just opening the ticket or test case system automatically, or transferring test results automatically, saves time in the long run. Clean-up scripts can work wonders, too.
Learn to Use Your Tools
A tool is only effective if you know how to use it. That applies not just to our test automation tools and development environments, which usually even come with training courses. It applies just as much to standard software such as Word, Excel, or Windows and macOS themselves. People use them every day, and many don’t really know how. Learning here doesn’t only mean formal courses. It means above all the tricks, shortcuts and keyboard combinations that make life easier. You can often pick them up in the project or in communities.
Delegate to Team Members and Colleagues
Far too often we believe we have to do everything ourselves “because the others can’t”. Often that is simply wrong. Delegating is always a question of trust, between managers and their staff as much as between colleagues. Of the three options, it is certainly the one that takes the most effort to get over (which is probably why so few people do it), because you give up control. But if you swallow your pride (or get a push) and see that someone else can finish the task with a good result in less time, it can open up a whole new way of working together. This is also where you often run into the walls of process descriptions: “The test manager writes the test report, that’s what the process says”, even though the tester might evaluate the test results much faster and better.
Delegating in Private Life, Too
Last year, as a self-experiment, I started delegating certain private tasks to a VPA (virtual personal assistant). My assistant researches various topics, for example, or finds good prices for this and that, sorts data, tables and databases, merges them and fills in missing information, tidies up the metadata of my music collection or simply makes documents look nice. I’m happy to hand over these tedious jobs, and the time I’ve gained is well worth the price.
These are just a few ideas, but once you start paying attention, it’s amazing how many of these avoidable time wasters you notice in yourself and the people around you. So watch out for them and get rid of them, so you can concentrate on the things that matter. That is where focus comes in … but that’s another story.
