Survive quality crisis in your IT project

I guess every tester was in situation, when delivered code is completely unusable or brakes the large part of functionality.
Quick tips, how to react to quality crisis in project (usually happens when market is waiting for your product now).

• Do not get lost, take cup of tea or coffee
• If possible, return code back to development to do unit testing themselves. Blockers are just not acceptable, and team has to start to use this test entry criteria for real
• Ask for list if changes and modified components, to target testing more properly
• Be sure you have prepared test cases, covering both new features and regression
• Organize smoke test to catch fast-to-find and fast-to-fix blockers
• Execute test cases by priority
• Make project data driven, sharing easy understandable, but valuable metrics. Do not forget to involve responsible shareholders and mention business risks. Examples of metrics could be planed vs executed test cases; covered vs not covered risks; rate of failure; % of fixed; total amount of issues by priority

After system is stabilized, reach out for project managers or quality assurance lead. You have a right to discuss reasons for erroneous code being deployed to test environments. Maybe they miss some useful processes? Maybe the weakest link is business analysis? Take proactive role towards Quality Assurance in your workplace. Be ready to inform, what will happen in case team continues working the save way.

On the other hand, I would advise not to push too much for big changes immediately. Might be, that your project or company are not ready to implement all good practices yet. Or maybe change is very slow. Your time might still come a bit later, when circumstances and long time strategy will reach our for better quality.

I am looking forward to growing together with testing community and sharing my experience. If you liked my ideas, please consider supporting my time: paypal.me/EvelinaUrb