RFC: Ideas to improve engineering productivity & participation

[atodorov]

What makes a test engineer productive when they need to assess product risk and new features, when mapping product requirements documents (PRD) to test plans and test cases, when collaborating on user stories and behavior specification ? What makes developers, product owners, designers and other professionals productive when it comes to dealing with testing ?

For example consider the following workflow:

• Company has idea for a new product
• In case this is a big product it may have its own mission, i.e. what kind of problem is it trying to solve and for which group of customers
• Product backlog is then created which outlines features that map to the product mission
• Then the team, together with test engineers perform example mapping and discuss and refine the initial feature requirements. User stories are created
• Behavior secification may also be created
• Test plans and test cases are the immediate product of BDD specs and desired user stories

Later we iterate through the sprints and for each sprint something like this happens:

• Desired product features are planned for development. They must be complete at least in terms of requirements, specs and tests
• Devel writes code, maybe some unit tests, testers can also write automated tests and/or manually verify the current state of the feature being developed
• Testing, including exploratory is performed before feature is merged
• Rinse and repeat

Devel is also part of testing, right? Product owners, UX and interaction designers as well. Producing quality software product is a team effort!

This issue is for crazy ideas which will make testing (any part of the process) easier, more productive, less cumbersome. Also make it easier (or force you) to think differently when dealing with product activities so that this will benefit the final quality of the product.

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[atodorov]

@jeanpaul1304, @bgerrice you have upvoted this issue but the original description is too broad, not quite something actionable. Please share in more details how you imagine the proposed feature will work, e.g. what kind of workflow you would like to see. Without such information we're left to guess what people want and I'd rather close this issue instead.