Managing Interruptions: Strategies for Enhanced QA Team Performance

Interruptions/adhoc work can significantly impact any QA team's performance, quality, and morale. In many cases, QA teams find that a significant portion of their sprint is dedicated to unplanned activities. This article discusses strategies to manage these interruptions and shares key practices to maintain productivity and efficiency.

Here, two factors are crucial: the aspects we can control (like feature testing, automation) and those beyond our control (such as customer escalations).

Focus on What Can Be Controlled

Engage the Team

• It's important for the team to understand how their contributions add value to the company and the team as a whole.
• Hold regular sessions with the team to understand their concerns and ensure everyone contributes to these interruptions.
• Additionally, gather ongoing and increasing challenges from sprint retrospectives.

These discussions can often lead to valuable insights and help identify major areas to focus on to overcome these challenges.

Identify focus areas and create checklists for each

Make a checklist to fix problems in each focus area. Here are a few focus areas and items for the checklist:

• Stable regression automation suite (fix flaky tests, use more API tests, add retry options).
• Improve how tests are done (better test design to run more tests to achieve maximum parallelism, keep tests independent, use separate test data).
• Automate everything possible (backup and restore Jenkins, auto start tests, auto report results, auto log issues, data clean up).
• Encourage In-Sprint Automation.
• Identify and fix knowledge gaps within the team.

Managing Team Dynamics

• Help the team understand and adapt to the interruptions.
• Recognize that each team member has unique strengths and weaknesses.
• Identify members comfortable with context switching and allocate time in their sprint for adhoc activities to prepare them.
• Ensure that team members who are not comfortable with the changes understand their importance and provide them with sufficient time to adapt.
• Acknowledge that some team members may still struggle, which is acceptable. These individuals are often excellent problem-solvers and may require focused time.
• Aim for a diverse team with a range of talents and strengths.

Adapting to the Uncontrollable

• Leaders acknowledging tasks that are out of their team's control, like customer escalations.
• Offer solutions considering business impact, if possible.
• Broader level process changes might be needed to reduce these problems in the future.

Managing interruptions/adhoc work is critical for maintaining QA team performance and morale. By focusing on what can be controlled, engaging the team, and implementing efficient strategies, QA teams can successfully navigate these challenges.