Software testing talks: KPIs for QA, expensive mistakes, and daily stand-ups

In our ‘Software testing talks’ blog posts we collect the most active discussions in different communities about everything connected to software testing.

So you don’t need to subscribe to dozens of groups and channels – everything the most important is here. Follow the Software Testing Talks Facebook group and r/softwaretestingtalks Reddit community to get our weekly discussions lists directly to your feed.

Briefly, here is what folks were talking about during the last week:

Relevant KPIs for QA

How do you guys handle the coworker that tries to be a manager but their in the same position as you?

What is the most expensive mistake you’ve made as a tester?

The best 10 test management tools to use in 2022

Are the QA people more ‘suitable’ as the ‘managerial’ material?

Are QAs apart out your daily stand up?

Is QA a thankless job?

Angie Jones, Tariq King, James Whittaker, Joe Colantonio, and other testers as NFTs

You don’t learn software testing, automation or development just from reading a book

Let’s dive deeper into the most interesting opinions.

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Relevant KPIs for QA

What are some of the KPIs you guys use to track the quality of the processes and overall projects in your company? I am starting to learn about this area and wanted to know how other people use it in their contexts. 🙂

>> check the discussion in a r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

I really liked this answer:

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How do you guys handle the coworker that tries to be a manager but they are in the same position as you?

We have a guy that requested the team let everyone know when we each go to lunch so someone can man the phone lines.

He’ll make his own documentation and expect us to follow it and say “this step can’t be missed.”

It’s just annoying I guess, I usually just try to avoid him when I can.

Our director likes him and he’s moving back here and will be with us again which is unfortunate.

Do you have team members who try to be a manager when they’re not?

>> check the discussion in a r/ITCareerQuestions Reddit community.

This answer is really great:

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What is the most expensive mistake you’ve made as a tester?

Some months ago, I saw a similar discussion in some community for software developers and there was a story about a team that built an entire greenfield factory for a product they couldn’t build. It was probably a $100m mistake. I can’t imagine how I would be coping with knowing I was a part of this mistake.

But of course, the only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones who don’t do anything. Mistakes are part of the engineering journey, and as long as they are not repeated, they make us better.

So I’m curious, what is the most expensive mistake you’ve made as a tester?

>> check the discussion in a r/softwaretestingtalks Reddit community.

I loved this answer:

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What are the best 10 test management tools to use in 2022?

Having a platform to handle all rounds of testing is crucial, especially as more software developers use cycle methodologies like Test-Driven Development. I’ve found a great article that describes all the best test management tools available on the market right now. Of course, aqua cloud is one of them 😊.

>> Check the article that describes the most popular test management tools in 2022.

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Are the QA people more ‘suitable’ as the ‘managerial’ material?

My current company is constantly using our QA people as the source material for the managerial (i.e. PMs) jobs.

Senior devs usually go to tech lead and evangelists position, but QA are usually promoted to QA team leads and after this to overall team leads and project manager positions.

The HQ is concerned that most devs are introvert types and mostly concentrated on their tasks and current sprints/code etc, without the need to constantly check the overall performance and state of things in the project.

They are considering QA to be the most ‘caring’ and ‘involved’, not only from the tech point of view, but also from the face to face and hand to hand communication.

So while devs are great from the tech and code POV, QA are able to quickly grow their social skills and people management skills.

I can quote one of my superiors, his controversial remark was “Most devs are experiencing problems with people management. People are not the machines. They are not eating the code for breakfast. They can fail, forget, work more slowly than expected, can’t understand things while thinking they successfully understood it, and it seems like QA are more capable of managing this. QA are not expecting the ideal behavior and performance from humans.”

It also helps that in our company it’s the QA who are responsible for demo sessions and Q&A sessions with customers and product owners.

What are you thinking about this kind of approach?

>> check the discussion in a r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

This answer is great:

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Are QAs apart out your daily stand up?

I’m apart of our daily stand ups and I’m running out of things to say that I did/working on. Just another day of testing and writing scripts! What else is there to say?

>> check the discussion in a r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

This answer is great:

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Is QA a thankless job?

Do you believe that QA is a thankless job?

From my experience, I see the developers and the managers for Eng teams at my company thank QA, but outside of them, everyone else seems to pretend that QA doesn’t exist (or doesn’t thank them at all for testing the products in advance for several days or months). It just kinda irritated me that the manager for eng team pointed out that I tested out the product for many days for them, and yet, the other manager only says thank you to the developer and eng team manager for their work and ignored me. Just a little frustrated. I don’t need a lot of praises but adding my name to that thank you sentence would have been nice.

What are your experiences?

>> check the discussion in a r/QualityAssurance Reddit community.

Totally agree with this answer:

Let’s take a look at some great insights from software testing influencers.

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It was fun to find news that some of the most popular testers were tokenized. Well, not really them, but their 8-bit portraits. These portraits can be bought as NFTs on OpenSea. The collection is named ‘TestNerds’, it has 16 items and 3 owners as for now. Among the NFT ‘test nerds’ are Angie Jones, Tariq King, James Whittaker, Joe Colantonio, Philip Lew, Janna Loeffler, Eran Kinsbruner, Carlos, Kidman, Alison Wade, Stacy Kirk, Jason Arbon and others.

Image from the @jarbon twitter

The project was created by Jason Arbon. Read more about the idea in the author’s blog post.

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>> Check discussion under the post here.

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Let it be your little reminder of how important is taking a break:

>> Check discussion under the post here.

So now you know what was going on in the software testing community last week. Follow the Software Testers Ideas Flow group on FB and r/softwaretestingtalks on Reddit to get testers’ ideas flow of every week directly to your feed.

Feel free to contact me on Linkedin if you have any suggestions or ideas about Testers’ Ideas Flow blogs. I am always happy to connect with testers and get even more discussions to my feed 🙂