Remote Testing Enables Agile Development While Working From Home

Like many businesses around the world, Applause instructed all its global employees to work remotely starting last month.

While business remains open at Applause, this represents an adjustment period for workers and businesses around the globe. We are mindful that employees and entire departments are adapting to a new daily routine. When you can’t turn around and ask your coworker a question that will help move a project along, or access certain technologies that are available in the office, it becomes a challenge to get work done quickly and competently.

For development teams that use the Agile methodology, the inability to work quickly could be a crushing blow for productivity. But Applause’s internal QA team hasn’t slowed down in recent weeks.

How can your QA team ensure that it continues to be Agile while everyone works from home?

“Stick to the routine you have followed before going remote,” Dean Vittum, Applause’s QA manager, said. “We all are professionals, and if we follow our standard processes — like daily check-ins, stand-ups, sprint planning, lunch and learns and project triage — we should not skip a beat. You should check in with your teams a little more, and we’re recording our lunch/learns for everyone to access later on our Engineering wiki page. Overall, these are all parts of our jobs as engineers and QA professionals.

“Additionally, we leverage Applause’s uTest Community to test. The community has always been remote and responsive.“

For Applause’s uTest Community — a globally dispersed group of vetted QA professionals — the transition to working from home has, well, not been a transition at all. These testers already work from home on their own devices, and provide value by testing clients’ digital experiences in all types of scenarios.

“We leverage our Applause Community to test, and the community has been very responsive and a great example on how to work remotely.”

Dean Vittum, QA Manager, Applause

Applause’s uTest Community has been doing remote testing for over a decade, and is uniquely positioned to provide on-demand testing services for companies that are currently struggling to maintain their previous speed of development.

For Vittum, the Community enables him to scale up his testing team at a moment’s notice and add new skill sets that would be difficult to replicate in-house.

“The Community provides us different testing skills and practices — not every tester is the same because of their skill-sets, which makes our Community unique,” Vittum said.

“Our testers from the Applause community are able to jump in and test at the drop of a hat, and ultimately contribute to that success. We’re able to scale up our testing capacity exponentially when we use the Community in this way, and ultimately it leads to a stronger release.”

And, for Vittum, working within the Agile framework and with the Community’s distributed testing practices have prepared his team to move to a remote workforce without skipping a beat.