The COVID–19 pandemic has changed the way that the entire world functions. From our personal lives to professional industries, things have undergone a major upheaval in a matter of just a few weeks and months. But in these difficult times, the world of software testing teams has affected like all other working teams. You may think at first glance that the work of software quality assurance teams should not be affected even if they have to work from their homes because they can access the technical equipment they need. Sadly, this is far from the truth.
The first major problem faced by thousands of companies in the order booking app testing industry, both big and small, was that many employees did not have the right equipment at home compared to what was available in the workplace. For example, many employees did have computers, but some employees had computers that were old and lacked both the capacity and speed required for efficiently handling of their testing tasks. Even if an employee did have a high-quality computer, there was the added challenge that they didn’t have access to high speed internet because of their geographic location or bandwidth overload as happened early on in the pandemic.
A large part of quality assurance is working as a team and coordinating with other team members every step of the way. This was definitely easier to do when everybody was working in the same office. If you had a query, wanted to discuss something, or hold a quick urgent meeting, then all of that could be arranged in a matter of a minutes. Because of the COVID–19 pandemic, this had to be done virtually which presents a different set of challenges. Even if the entire team can log in to a Zoom meeting, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, there is no guarantee that there won’t be poor internet connection or that everybody is able to understand everything that is being discussed during the meeting. However, this is something that we have to learn to manage. Everybody needs to adjust to a new way of living where they have to protect themselves against the deadly coronavirus, and at the same time, they also have to make sure that their work does not suffer and the world can keep moving forward.
Thankfully, there are millions of companies all across the globe that are trying to solve the various problems that their employees are facing when it comes to software testing at home. For example, Unisys is an information processing company that is based in the United States of America. Unisys was facing the same issues that I mentioned above in this article. In order to help its employees and make sure that the quality of work does not suffer, they collated a list of employees who were having trouble due to a lack of proper internet connection or equipment and then shipped out the required equipment to their employees’ home addresses. Because of this, the company has seen an increase in their overall productivity levels, and the quality of work done has also increased.
Similar steps have also been taken by many organisations in India to make sure that they are able to function effectively during these difficult times. However, it is also understandable that not every business would have the means to take up a similar approach to solving their problems. This is why it is suggested that the best way to manage this situation would be to coordinate with the entire team and select the solution that works best for all parties involved.
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