How can testers make their work more visible?

Here's few things that testers can try to create the visibility of testing that will help the teams to understand better instead of having assumptions.

1. Pair Testing

Pair with the developers while testing. It helps in knowledge sharing, breaking the silo's and also helps the developers to understand how testing is being done.

And it doesnt have to be always pairing with only developers, we can pair with UX to test the usability and accessibility of the feature, we can pair with the business stakeholders to check if the requirements of the given feature were as expected.

By pairing with all the different roles, it helps in creating the visibility of how the testing is done and how testing helps to uncover a lot of things.

2. Daily Standups

Testers can use their story telling skills during the daily standups to share about all the observations and any issues about the features. It helps the entire team to understand what's being tested and what information is being capture while testing.

This helps in creating the visibility of how testing helps to uncover lot of unknowns as well and that its not just to find the bugs.

3. Documentation

Creating a central place for the teams with all the topics related to quality, for example documenting test strategy on confluence. When I say documenting I don't mean to create lengthy documents but just the right detail of information so anyone on the team can just follow and it would also be good for onboarding when someone new joins the team.

I use mindmaps while I'm testing the story and attach that to the Jira story. This helps the team to understand the detail level of testing done for each story and how its done.

4. Advocate for Quality

Advocate for quality improvements and different approaches to help the team to work towards quality. You can try running some workshops and you could also advocate for the processes within the team.

5. Testing Community/Guild

Have a space or slack channel so people can discuss challenges or any ideas about testing. Have a montly guild meeting and invite different roles like developers, UX and BA's so they could contribute and colloborate in the quality improvements process.

These are few things that can help testers to create visibility of testing which is so important to break the assumptions.

Do you have any other suggestions that you have tried on teams? Share it in the comments!