Connecting testers to the development team?

Question

Project management

Hello. It turned out the following situation: I became the head of the development department, the department is working on several projects, in fact, some of them follow Agile, the second follows the iterative model.
The problem is this: there are no testers in the team of almost 10 people. Those. all testing work is divided between programmers (sometimes they write unit tests), an architect (sometimes writes integration tests and kicks developers to write units and correct the code) and an analyst (checks the system’s performance and correctness from the user’s point of view).
Now there is a desire to start hiring testers to improve the quality of products. But before you hire people, you need to clearly describe the process of their work. Those. when to include them in the project, how to write a test plan, what types of tests, when to use them, etc.
Can you tell me where to start this work? What books, articles, websites to read?

Answer 1

Speaking from my own experience in an attempt to apply to your case.
In your case, most likely, you should use several key types of testing:
- Ad-hoc - i.e. "piercing" - when the tester verifies the fundamental performance and general correctness of the work of the "fresh" functionality. The result of his work is usually comments in the form “But here it doesn’t work for you”, “Here it doesn’t work like that”, which sometimes (!) Are made out as bugs. In this case, the tester acts, de facto, as the last link in the development team before transferring the functionality for further testing, and the tasks are transferred to him by the developer upon writing the functional block.
- Testing by test cases - a test analyst writes test cases based on requirements analysis, which are later performed by a tester (of course, these two functions can be combined, but there is a risk of human overload). When the requirements go into development, the same requirements go to the test analyst, who, based on them, identifies and then describes the test cases. In this case, it is important to debug the normal processes of a) requirements management in terms of communications (developers and testers get the same requirements, both development and testing are notified about changes in requirements, requirements are traced to test cases, etc.). After the functionality is transferred to testing, test cases are assembled into a test set (by a tester, test analyst, test manager, or someone else) and “run” by the tester.
There is also smoke testing, load testing, integration testing - their applicability should be assessed based on the realities of the projects (you gave too little information).
Accordingly, three main roles are seen:
- Test analyst (aka test plan developer, sometimes also test manager)
- Ad-hoc tester
- Tester
The test analyst is connected as soon as the requirements are ready for transfer to development. Ad-hoc - as soon as the development began to give the result to "feel". Tester - as soon as the development of the block of requirements is completed.

Answer 2

They said a lot of useful things, I won’t add on the topic of what to test, how to test (all sorts of TDD, unit tests, integration, black boxes, etc.). I will only add that by hiring testers, you will finally get a person responsible for the quality of the product before releasing it to production. Now you have shared responsibility between all team members and no one is responsible for quality, forgive me for such a phrase) It is important to realize this and push it away in building the work process. And let the analyst write something for testing, the programmer too, but there must be one head!

Answer 3

Figure out how you want to "improve quality." Testers will report bugs to you, but just their appearance will not improve the quality.
Determine the Tester's Responsibilities
If you don't have experience in testing, you still can't write which tests to use and when, so it's preferable to hire an experienced one.
the main Russian-language site for testing - software-testing.ru

Answer 4

In fact, at the moment, the role of a tester is performed by an analyst. That is, the recruited testers should be brought up to date by analysts. And the work process is something like this - Writing regression test cases that cover software requirements (main functionality) + creating test cases to check the defects found (which are going to be in a test set and the test case is run on a build in which the defect is eliminated) + endless exploratory testing .

Answer 5

As a way, I suggest switching to development through TDD, more difficult, but very concrete. On the other hand, I still do not decide on this action, it seems too difficult for me.