Feature Friday – How to Improve Collaboration in Agile Testing Teams?
All structure came from ideas. Whether it is the small business on the corner, your favorite celebrity social media account, or the donation center of your choosing everything was once run by a single or individual group of people. The same often occurs with application creation and testing. As the idea of an app is fostered, minimal resources are initially allocated to the creation and functionality of said idea or app. After the most viable product is achieved and functionality grows, so does testing complexity, time, and effort. This is why Quality Assurance teams exist. When applications of this scale and size become established within business processes it becomes increasingly tricky yet essential to test and maintain functionality, and therefore businesses allocate teams to doing so. This week’s feature Friday is brought to you by Milton and Adhi who will discuss exactly how Qyrus enables agile teams to improve collaboration within testing and Quality assurance.
Tell us more about How Qyrus enables collaboration and its use cases.
Milton:
Collaboration is embedded through all portions of Qyrus. During the process of test creation, each script can be tagged with custom and multiple simultaneous inputs. This means the tester, the sprint cycle, the release date, and the QA team member in charge can all be noted during script creation to maintain centralized data on the script that each team member can access.
Adhi:
Furthermore, when the scripts are executed, the reports are hosted in Qyrus as a centralized reporting location, with value metrics, screenshots, and video evidence. But if these reports needed to be shared or saved separately, Qyrus also offers downloadable reports, PDF reports, and Email reporting capabilities. This allows for the maintenance of integral executions and data while making reports dynamic and readily shareable.
Milton:
Exactly, even when scheduling a test, you have the option to input an email. This allows for status updates and executive summaries that are triggered as desired but send reports and notifications straight to the user’s email. Couple this with the ability to note defects straight to Jira from reports as well, and it is obvious Qyrus enables quality assurance teams to be both agile and collaborative.
What is this feature’s overall impact on the testing process?
Adhi:
Making testing teams more collaborative simplifies the testing process and leads to higher-quality application releases. With business analysts, developers, and testers on the same page, businesses can clearly establish and define application requirements, build and organize test scripts accordingly, and automate massive portions of their quality assurance and testing requirements.
Milton:
And with this transparency comes efficiency. Monitoring success, mitigating roadblocks, and producing high-quality applications, fast, require not only an agile methodology but also effective collaboration among all team members. Being able to keep all data centralized on Qyrus, while also making reports and execution data readily available through email, pdf, and downloadable reporting options, Qyrus enables clients with the best of both worlds giving teams maximum flexibility.
How might the collaborative nature of Qyrus help testers, developers, and business technologists? What value can this feature bring?
Milton:
We often see business technologists utilize this feature to take a step into testing. Because Qyrus is a low code no code solution that offers video and screenshot recordings of the test scripts, business analysts can follow the entire functionality and execution of the use case and test script while watching their application execute actions on video. Coupled with the collaborative nature of Qyrus, these users no longer need an instance or even to log into Qyrus but rather can digest these reports through email, PDF, or downloaded and maintained versions of test executions.
Adhi:
Testers also love Qyrus’s collaborative nature. Testers are often the most hands-on with the Qyrus solution but often struggle to relay testing information back to development and business-centric teams. We now see testers not only schedule executions on Qyrus but also their required outputs. That means every time a suite is scheduled so are the reports which will automatically be emailed out to all desired parties by the tester. Furthermore, any defects are logged straight from the Qyrus report to Jira or any other third-party defect management application allowing testers to send bugs and failed execution reports straight to the developer’s JIRA board with included screenshots, video, and execution evidence.
Milton:
Developers also use this functionality to ensure application coverage. Being built on a team-to-project structure, any members that are part of the team and project on Qyrus have access to all scripts, executions, and reports. This allows developers to access given projects and ensure the suite is covering the desired application functionality properly, that the sprints and regression tests are organized and built properly, and that executions are scheduled with reports populating required locations. Because nobody knows more about an application than its developer, Qyrus enables developers and testers to work as a unit, in tandem, to ensure functionality while maintaining the highest levels of test case coverage.
Does the same or similar functionality exist without Qyrus, and how do competitors address similar problems?
Adhi:
It may be the case that certain features are mirrored and certain functionalities exist outside of Qyrus to offer some collaborative solutions. What Makes Qyrus unique is not that there are collaborative capabilities, but that the platform itself was built to ensure the highest levels of collaboration. Utilizing collaborative features and capabilities across every aspect of testing allows Qyrus to not only offer collaboration but utilize collaboration to optimize the entire quality assurance lifecycle. Taking a team of individually intelligent developers and testers and coordinating to promote the highest efficiency and quality.
Milton:
Exactly, it is not as though Qyrus invented collaboration, but as a solution, Qyrus makes it that much easier for business technologists, developers, testers, heads of QA, and CTOs among others to impact the testing and quality assurance process. The more actively involved participants throughout the QA process the better, and Qyrus ensures all team members the ability to impact and monitor quality assurance effectively.
How do you see the collaborative nature of Qyrus impacting day-to-day operations across organizations?
Milton:
The collaborative nature of Qyrus is something we see utilized throughout organizations on a daily level. Whether it is the tagging mechanisms implemented every time a script is created, scheduling executions and automatic email triggers upon completion, or quick report-sharing options, Qyrus’ collaborative features are a highlight for users throughout daily testing tasks.
Adhi:
Exactly. It is not so much that the feature is something that is sought out and used every day, but more so a silent requirement. When collaborative features are being used properly, it is almost as if they are not even noticed. When clients are building scripts, throwing tags on them becomes second nature. Making sure everyone is on the email list when setting up a scheduled execution. These are not glamorous features but still provide immense impact, altering day-to-day actions to enhance and optimize the entire testing and quality assurance process.
Applications are taking over the business landscape. From client-facing applications that require a perfect user interface and an optimized user journey to internal applications that require efficiency and functionality to maintain business processes, testing, and quality assurance have never been more demanding. As businesses funnel resources into developing teams and research automation, note that one of the most important aspects to consider is collaboration. Having teams that can scale up and scale down as required, with a platform that centers around an organization and easy share options for executions and reports, Qyrus enables efficient and quality testing by promoting collaborative capabilities for agile test teams. That concludes this week’s Feature Friday, join us next week as we continue to discuss unique Qyrus features that optimize the quality assurance lifecycle.