A healthy QA culture results in strong, confident teams. And with a powerful team in place, you can produce exceptional products and achieve greater success when going to the market. While the task of building great culture belongs to the QA Team Manager, it’s up to each member of your software QA team to participate and contribute towards a healthy workplace culture.
But how can QA team management leaders accomplish this? What are the best methods when trying to motivate a team?
Success is achieved by emphasizing strong communication practices that extend beyond team boundaries and by empowering the individual engineers that make up these teams. When you reach out to meet the needs of your team, you create a work environment that’s conducive to excellent performance and accelerated progress.
Here's How To Manage QA Teams Through Motivation
Open communication + organized process = strong culture. Apply these seven tips on how to motivate your team and increase productivity of your QA team so that you can close the distance associated with QA outsourcing and boost team productivity:
- Deliver Daily Status Reports in a Crisp, Concise Manner: Visibility is essential in QA team management. Create a daily status report so that you always know where your team stands during the testing process. What tasks were completed yesterday? What tasks are to be completed today? What roadblocks are standing in the way of completing certain tasks? Delivering daily status reports is a great approach on how to motivate a team. By exposing team productivity on an everyday basis, you may find your QA testers inspired to take on more or harder tasks during a project.
- Provide Upper Management a Detailed Risk Analysis: In QA team management, risk analysis is the process of identifying the risks associated with your software application and prioritizing each risk to be tested during the development cycle based on its assigned level of risk. Examples of risks include time allocated for QA testing, client urgency on project delivery and incomplete requirements. A detailed risk analysis is a great place to start when managing QA teams. Knowing all associated risks within a project can guide your decision on task allocation as well as provide transparency on the testing environment within the project to all associated teams and professionals.
- Invite Developers, Business Analysts and Product Managers To Relevant Discussions: Time is precious during testing, and can be wasted when your QA testers do not have the insight they need to test cases or software issues. Scheduling a thirty-minute conversation early in the testing cycle can prevent hours of high frustration and zero productivity. Your quality assurance meeting topics can include development findings, consumer feedback, testing hesitations and product backstory - any information that is key in expediting the testing process so that development has time to fix any defects.
- Lead Daily Atand-Up Meetings: Your quality assurance meeting agenda for daily standups should be action-driven and to the point. These short meetings provide an opportunity for your QA testers to celebrate tasks that are completed, discuss bottlenecks within the testing process and brainstorm ways to remove blockages from critical tasks. An additional way to motivate a team is by also scheduling weekly and monthly meetings. These meetings can be a great way to monitor milestones and team progress as well as congratulate strong performers and allocate tasks or projects across testers based on skills and/or interest.
- Distribute Quality Assurance Meeting Agenda in Advance To The Team: This allows your QA testers to prepare any documentation or insight needed for the planned discussion. This advance notice also welcomes your testers to offer quality assurance meeting topics worth adding to the agenda. After the meeting, consider following up with your team by submitting the meeting minutes and action items. This can be a great way to motivate a team as meetings focus on project relevancy, team collaboration and problem-solving.
- Meet One-On-One With Every QA Engineer: If you want the answer on how to get a team motivated, it starts with individual conversations. Schedule some time every quarter to discuss performance and progress goals with each QA tester on your team. What factors were holding them back? What goals do they want to achieve next? Be a team player in each person’s career development. You can be the reason on how to motivate your team by wanting each member to grow and by providing desired opportunities to make that happen.
- Choose Your Actions & Words Wisely: It’s your choice on how to communicate effectively as a QA manager. And how to motivate a team begins with how you treat your team. Do you manage your team in a personable fashion? Are you friendly when communicating with your team? Or are you not aware of your behavior with your team? Your attitude can be the difference on how to get a team motivated. Think before you speak or write a correspondence so that you are conveying the right message aimed to inspire your QA testers to focus on the project, not look for work elsewhere.
Why Motivation Is How To Manage QA Teams
It’s always easier to manage a proud, motivated software QA team. And this can be achieved once you understand how to motivate your team through healthy workplace practices crucial to your team as professional QA testers and as real people.
We have long been advocates for creating the right company culture when establishing your QA approach. Strong motivational practices can boost and sustain team morale in the following ways:
- Encourages Individual Development: When QA team leaders provide the necessary tools for QA engineers, you create an environment that welcomes the pursuit of expanding their knowledge. QA engineers that seek to learn also seek out ways to incorporate current best practices that increase productivity, leading to more ways on how to get a team motivated. Offering organized training sessions and team building exercises can significantly improve the learning curve of your entire team.
- Inspires Floods of Creativity: When you organize brainstorming sessions (or include them on your quality assurance meeting agenda), you tap into the collective creativity of your team. Setting up opportunities for strategic exploration and team collaboration usually results in innovation and new techniques for solving existing problems.
- Increases Self-Esteem & Personal Drive: Empowering your engineers publicly should always be one of your quality assurance meeting topics at team meetings. When you take the time to recognize progress and individual accomplishments at team meetings, you boost morale and encourage other QA engineers to do their best work in the future.
Next Steps on How To Motivate Your Team
Want more tips on how to motivate a team?
A QA Partner can help you manage your QA testing, particularly if your team can enjoy the benefits of outsourcing when resource constrained.
If your team needs a helping hand, consider partnering with a QA services provider like QASource. Our team of testing experts are skilled in motivational workplace practices for QA teams so that your team can enjoy productive processes and revenue-driven results. Get a free quote today.
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What tips do you use to empower your team?
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