Collaboration is essential in any organization, and test automation is no different, especially when so many decisions in different departments rely on the results of testing from business to engineering to product. It’s up to Quality Assurance managers to ensure that their findings are easily shareable and understandable by everyone, and it will make the lives of QA practitioners easier if they can share the raw reports rather than translating them into layman’s terms. Not only will specific software help with this, but also a universally held value of transparency within the organization.

Building a Collaborative Environment

With the boom of remote work, fostering a culture of collaboration and a sense of togetherness is increasingly challenging. After all, how can a team feel close if they’ve never (or only rarely) met each other? The key is to break silos, which are deceptively easy to create if teams are all doing their daily stand-ups and rarely interacting with one another. A big part of this is enabling fast, personable communication. IM platforms like Slack, Teams, and even Discord that make communication instant is vital. Still, the value of turning cameras on cannot be underestimated (and this comes from the keyboard of an introvert who used to hate turning cameras on). Slack Huddles and Discord video calls help make that quick connection, but Zoom and Google Meet calls don’t take long to set up either. 

A central location where you can share all information and files needed is also a necessity (that way you don’t need to use that messaging platform too much) so you aren’t chasing colleagues for materials. Notion, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and more are all great platforms for housing files that the whole company can access. Bonus points if you have someone who loves to organize things into millions of folders to make it even easier to navigate.

All this being said, the best way to truly build a collaborative environment is through strong leadership. Transparency, patience, and understanding promote a workplace where everyone is willing to share their ideas, work product, and data, even when KPIs might not be as strong as one hoped or the creative juices aren’t flowing during a brainstorming session.

Collaboration and the Cloud

So the above is all great, but what does it mean in terms of test automation? Well, just as you need a central, cloud location to share collateral, images, or anything else a team would need, having a cloud-based testing platform also makes sharing easier, from tests to bugs to reports. Cloud software is also one of the technologies that has made remote working possible since anyone can access communal information. 

As Quality Assurance accelerates to keep up with the pace of the Software Development Lifecycle, QA practitioners don’t have time to spend waiting for someone else to send them a report or for a meeting the next business day with a dev to go over a found bug. A central platform where everyone can see reports and generate URLs that exactly replicate a bug saves everyone valuable time as you build up to your next release.

Collaboration in Virtuoso

Virtuoso makes collaboration a breeze with plenty of cross-functional features and reports that are easy to read no matter the job title. Nearly all of our dashboards are color-coded and easy for non-practitioners to understand, and I would be remiss not to tease at some exciting new reporting updates that may or may not be upcoming… but I can’t give away too much! So instead, remember that ability that would be nice to have above on URLs that can replicate bugs? Virtuoso can definitely do that. If a test step finds a true bug, you can get a URL from the step and send it straight to the devs so they can see it themselves. QA practitioners can also work on authoring steps in different journeys at the same time, and to cut down on the confusion of which journeys do what, you can write journey summaries yourself or have AI take a look and generate them for you! So, ready to try it for yourself? We’ve got everything you need to get started with a free trial!