How to get your Team together and be a Happy Unit

Get your team together Testers in Blue #ZyQualSquad
Testers in Blue #ZyQualSquad

If you are a leader(with a title or without title), I am sure you must be thinking often on how to get your team together. How to juice productivity with visible vibrant energy and free-flowing passion across the team. You must be thinking of conducting some awesome team building activities, present(or receive) content of great help to your entire team so that they would feel that they are learning in some way. My mind is often occupied with such thoughts. Not just because I lead a team, but because I naturally love to push people to get their best, to grow together. And of course, I equally love to learn from the people around me. 

Weekly Wednesday session is one of those many initiatives me and my team took as our efforts towards making the above possible. If you do not know what our weekly Wednesday session is about, you can get a glimpse of what exactly it is here. Ok, so I am not really going to directly tell you the ‘how to’ here as the title might have conveyed, but I am surely going to share few practical hints on ‘what can be done’. Wednesday is a fun day for us. It stays eventful and it stays productive. It acts well to burst away midweek blues if any. However, last few sessions were going bit unplanned and though we were having fun, the feeling was there that we can juice more productivity and fun if we plan it properly. Taking people together, engaging the audience is a skill. Content too has to be different.

Time was for me to get the matter in hand. I informed the team that I would be presenting throughout the session and have interesting things lined up for them. We usually meet for around two to two and a half hours every Wednesday, so I wanted to adhere to the schedule and still cover a lot of variety which I want all my team members to focus on too in future. I spent some 45 minutes to put my mind mined stuff into a PowerPoint presentation. Here is what all was there:

  • Testing Trends: 

how to get your team together ZyQualSquad TrendTracker

I decided to start with something related to Testing. Need and challenge of any IT professional these days is to stay up to date with what is happening in the industry. The case with us, the testers is no different. What could have been a better choice than quick talk around State of Testing Survey 2017? Thanks to PractiTest and Tea-time with Testers for conducting this awesome survey with well defined and well-directed questions. The report talks about many things such as where the overall testing industry is heading, what tools they are using, how important now is to break the comfort zone and learn something new for testers, how the career shifts are happening and so on. If you haven’t had look at it yet, you can check it here.

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Why software testing? Here is the answer you want

perfect answer to why software testing

It wasn’t a first time someone said something about testing and it troubled me. It is just that the recent event pushed me to change something about- why software testing? It went like this.

It was just another call from a computer science graduate who is looking for job opportunity. This time the call was from one of my relative.

Part of conversation after initial greetings-

She: Actually I got my results last week and looking for job. Please let me know if you come across any.
Me: Sure! Tell me what interests you. Development or Testing ?
She: (Laughs…) No no, not testing(still laughing), Development only.
Me: Ohh! (Tongue-tied)(She didn’t knew/know I work as Tester of course)

You see the problem? Problem is not that she choose development over testing, that is absolutely fine considering the choice factor. Problem is her reaction when I said “Testing”, rather a question- why software testing? why should I even think about it?

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Sneak peek into our Wednesday QA Team Session

img-20160929-wa0004.jpg

Wednesday is when my entire QA team(we call it ZyQualSquad) gets together for couple of hours for our weekly Team Session and we do quite a few things there. I will share what we do in detail someday maybe. Till then a sneak peek into what we do “Every Wednesday” in our QA Team Session.

Well, we plan it for each Wednesday and do very few things.

  • We share new stuff. 
  • We implement new ideas.
  • We collaborate.
  • We present our views. 
  • We celebrate.
  • We make each other speak.
  • We help each other grow.
  • We run through team building activities.
  • We get ‘clicked’,  like anything. 
  • Yes! We PLAY.
  • and we EAT.

Very few things right? :p

Well because we have such an eventful Wednesday, every single week, we never face midweek low.

Rather we get Recharged and Rejuvenated 🙂

Here I go.

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6 Years of My Software Testing Journey

I rather joined Zycus as a QA quite accidentally. I started interview rounds for a role of Developer, but was later conveyed about Testing Opportunity. So I joined on terms of being given Development opportunity in case Testing doesn’t interest me(which I never had to even think about later). Needless to say, I knew nothing much about Testing before starting the interview rounds and very less by the time I got selected.

So why am I writing this piece? Well, I am doing so to share very critical aspects of being a Software Tester which I learnt during my journey. I cracked my interviews, joined one of the biggest and most ambitious product of Zycus, logged near 3000 defects in initial 2-2.5 years only, spanning across categories like Functional, Performance, Security, Usability, Multilingual, Multi-tenancy and many more . What I want to highlight is- My journey till this point(~2/2.5 years) of time was successful without any direct and great knowledge of Software Testing principles, Test matrices, Testing theories, etc.

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