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Working with QA and Testing teams across hundreds of organizations, we at Panaya have seen more and more organizations setting up internal or external ‘Testing Factories’ to which all of the organization’s testing activities are outsourced. The benefits are clear: time and resources’ saving, methodology alignment, higher levels of proficiency and – as a result – quality. However, challenges are also not to be dismissed.
If you are a testing and QA executive trusted with the success of this method, your challenge is twofold. On the one hand, you must guarantee that in-house business users are fully aligned with test plans and execution processes. On the other hand, you must ensure offshore teams manage to stay connected and up-to-date on business processes and defect status.
Choosing the right Test Management software is key to your ‘Testing Factory’ success. If you are on the lookout for a solution, this blog post might be of interest. Here are some of the key capabilities we believe are essential to this mission.
Visibility
A test management dashboard and the integrated processes it enables are critical to ensuring a smooth collaboration between headquarters and your Testing Factory teams. For example, testing and QA project managers should be able to easily assign different steps of a single business process to multiple functional experts or key users who can then run the tests in an automatic sequential workflow – reporting back to the Testing Factory via the same unified platform.
Intuitive, Hassle-Free Test Evidence
Seamless test evidence generation capabilities should be imbedded into your test management platform. This would enable business users to easily report defects and Testing Factory and QA teams to easily recreate them.
With no additional effort required by testers, your testing platform should automatically document every test execution – delivering granular test evidence. This reduces the back and forth between developers, business users and Test Factory and QA testers, providing a record of steps for test reproduction. Additionally, documentation is always audit-ready, ensuring you comply with all company quality standards.
Buy-in from All Business Users
Introducing a major initiative such as a Testing Factory is always met with some preliminary resistance, especially as it requires additional training on top of users’ core duties.
The ideal testing platform should offer effortless onboarding, minimal training and overall ease of use to remove the resistances expected from business users who are not professional testers. Those users have no time to master (yet) another testing tool on top of their daily job. Their cooperation is especially important when it comes to offshore operations, that might be even more out-of-touch with daily business processes than in-house IT.
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Lapeyre’s Testing Factory Enabler: Panaya Test Dynamix
Groupe Lapeyre S.A., a leading European manufacturer and retailer of doors, windows, and other joinery products and a subsidiary of the Saint-Gobain Group have set up their own offshore ‘Testing Factory’ to which all of the organization’s testing activities are outsourced. What started out as a pilot experiment has turned out to be so successful that it is now being considered for the entire Saint-Gobain Group.
Watch Lapeyre’s Sébastien Giraud discuss “The only all-in-one tool in the market”
Experience the risk-free change Sébastien is so excited about with a free personalized demo.
Sébastien Giraud who is heading the project for Lapeyre explains the key challenges and advantages of the system in a recent video. Here is an excerpt:
“Thanks to the collaboration, test evidence and ease-of-use inherent to Panaya Test Dynamix, we now test everything out of our offshore ‘Testing Factory’ with highly accurate feedback.” With Panaya, Lapeyre has managed to handle 20 scenarios of 400-500 steps in total, executed every two weeks. “Panaya helped us do all of that without Microsoft Word or Excel,” Sébastien said. “The Panaya tools tells us what to test so we don’t test too much, just the necessary items,” he adds. “At the end of the day, we test more efficiently than we used to”.