Why this matters
Testers rarely work alone. You will sit inside a product team with developers, a product manager and perhaps a designer, all working towards a release date. Knowing how teams organise their work, where bugs and tasks are tracked, and how to report on testing is what turns a careful individual into a useful team member. Several testing adverts we read named Agile ways of working and tools like Jira directly.
How software teams organise work
Most software teams today work in short cycles. Instead of building for a year and testing at the end, they plan a small piece of work, build it, test it and release it, then repeat. Each cycle might last one or two weeks. This means testing happens all the time, alongside development, and you need to keep up with a steady flow of changes.
Teams track every piece of work in an issue tracker: a shared list where each task, feature and bug is a card or ticket with a status such as To do, In progress, In review, Testing and Done. Testers spend a lot of time in these tools: reading feature tickets, logging bugs and moving tickets along when testing passes.
What this section covers
- Agile teams and issue trackers. The vocabulary of sprints, user stories, acceptance criteria and stand ups, and how to work in a tracker such as Jira.
- Test plans, regression and reporting. How to plan what will be tested before a release, how to recheck old features after changes, and how to summarise results so the team can decide whether to release.