How to deal with common situations in QA area

I know you are probably thinking, why do you need to talk about it ? Unfortunately, I can spend hours here talking about the situations that a big part of QAs go through everyday. Maybe you are not a QA, but you have to deal with one of these problems as well.

So, I will talk about the most common problems and how you can deal with them:

When you have been telling management about a problem for weeks and now you’re just like

This is a classical problem, QAs should raise their concerns about some issue that they see it is coming. As a QA you know how the end user uses the product and you can see some upfront failures, scalability issues, etc.

Your job is to point the issue and raise the concern. Now, it is up to your manager to act on the problem or not.

When you hear about “small last-minute changes”

This is completely common in agile (personally, I don’t think this is a major issue), we just need to be aware of the risks. If we keep this in mind, it is okay. In the end we are not machines, and most of people don’t perform well when working under pressure compared to a normal day.

My advice is to be cold blooded when you have these last minute demands, just go to a place where you can focus and ignore any outside distractions, put some music on if you think it is better to concentrate.

When a new feature comes to QA in the last day of the sprint

Be realistic, as a QA you probably already know the percentage of the bugs you will find for each developer’s ticket in the first round of tests. This experience improves according to the time you stay in the company and know the quality of the work of each developer.

When this feature arrives to QA, be realistic and raise the point that it has good chances to be back in development and not finished until the end of the sprint.

When a bug slips through to the production environment

Don’t cry ! haha This is completely common, and this is not always QA’s fault. QA is just the tip of the iceberg and for this reason you need to know the feature not only on the technical, but also on the business point of view. For this reason the kickoff meetings and all the details are important.

When no one recognizes QA

This is really sad, but after some years you get used to it. I mean, it is not ideal, most of the recognition comes from the developers themselves or  the QAs that work with you.