How human factors can become QA's secret weapon

Let's imagine the end of a busy working day. Everyone is already tired. There is one difficult endpoint left to test. It has many nested arrays, and many parameters have dependencies on each other. The deadline for the task is, as often happens, today.

We test all this through sighs and “I can’t.” And then the back in one of the ten nested arrays (it seems that the architectural solution was invented in a hurry, like the presentation made five minutes before the start of the meeting), returns “mail” instead of “email”. We no longer notice this little thing, we give it to the front and voila – we have broken parsing in the application.

Fatigue, autumn, bad mood – it is very important to take into account the human factor. If we haven't analyzed what it affects, how can we understand the criticality of not managing it? And how do you even manage it?

Let's figure it out.

Why is it important to consider the human factor?

When we understand that we are all human, the quality of communication in the team improves

If we understand our colleagues' motivations, we can manage their expectations.

If we sense the team's spirit, we can prevent burnout and sudden layoffs.

When we understand the psychology of each team member and our own, the quality of team interaction improves through more coordinated and productive work.

The human factor is creative

For this reason, the manual tester will never be replaced by AI and automated tests. We have intuition (which must be trusted and developed), as well as a rich imagination.

Now imagine how much of the potential of our human capabilities is lost if we do not work on them?

Human Advantage – Adaptation

We often work with pressing deadlines, an endless number of tasks, changing plans and, as a result, we encounter stress. In such situations, it can be difficult to control your emotions 100%; you need pumped-up emotional intelligence and the ability to adapt.

How can the human factor harm work?

We are subjective in our decision making

And during testing we make a lot of decisions:

we decide how to prioritize based on our—subjective—judgments;
Everyone has a unique experience or lack thereof – because of this, we assess the severity and consequences of problems differently.

For example, there is a tester Vasya who specializes in usability testing. He needs to replace his colleague Oleg, a back testing specialist. Vasya, naturally, may miss mistakes that are obvious to Oleg, spend several times more time on the test, or not attach due importance to a problem whose importance is not obvious to him.

This is a simple example, and in life things are not always so easy. For example, a team may consist only of manual testers from the e-com front. Does this mean that we won't find the same problem here? No, because each team member has his own experience working with different features, not only in quantity, but also in the “depth” of interaction with them.

Someone knows everything about testing payments through SberPay, because before that he worked on five projects and tested SberPay everywhere. And someone from the same team had only one chance to briefly look at the work of SberPay during smoke testing. Both the first and second team members tested SberPay. Another question is how exactly did they test it?

We get tired, worried and burn out

In emotionally unstable situations, completely unnoticed, we can miss obvious mistakes, misjudge strengths, demotivate the rest of the team and, thereby, reduce the quality of the product as a whole.

Let's imagine a team overloaded with tasks. A three-week sprint comes with a huge number of tasks whose deadlines cannot be shifted. To get everything done, we work at night and on weekends and still worry that we might not get everything done.

One team member underestimates the complexity of the task, making it too late to request additional resources. As a result, the task is performed superficially, the product remains defective, the correction of which is time-consuming and expensive – it was impossible to release such a task.

By the way, this is a problem with an asterisk and you can approach its solution in different ways. Therefore, we will wait for your opinion: what should we have done in such a situation and could it have been prevented?

How to use the human factor to your advantage?

We put ourselves in the user's shoes

And show empathy, dudes!

It would be great, of course, if we test the product so thoroughly that there will not be a single inconsistency with the technical specifications.

But what's the point? ~~if your developer cries~~ if during development we did not take into account the main aspect of the product: it must satisfy the need and do it at the required level of service.

By service level we mean the quality with which the product performs its main task. If we are working on an application for traders, it must not only display futures quotes correctly, but also work stably and quickly—for some transactions, seconds count. While in a book reading application, speed is not so important and it would be wise to pay more attention to usability testing.

The product must not only solve the user’s problem, but do it effectively, comfortably and with minimal difficulty for the client, meeting his expectations for the quality of work. If you do not pay attention to this, the product may become useless to anyone, despite the complete absence of bugs.

Can you now, without any hesitation, name the user need that you are covering? For example, if you're working on a grocery delivery app, can you confidently say why it's being used? To avoid going to the store for groceries? Because it has a wider range than its competitors? Is delivery fast? Or is it long, but the food is always fresh and the cheese is produced on your own farm? Or maybe they choose it for good discounts?

We create a positive work atmosphere

If we pay enough attention to this, we will not only get a great team, but we will also be able to raise the level of satisfaction: both ours and our colleagues. This will lead to improved quality of work and reduced turnover. For example, to improve the atmosphere, we introduced an automated health check system into our processes. Over the two years of using it, we have reduced the “staff turnover” from 16% to 8% and completely non-violently retain 40 people a year (if you’re interested, here you will find details).

To create such an atmosphere, you need to create a space where each team member can freely express their thoughts. The practice of recognizing achievements will help with this. A simple thank you or formal recognition with a certificate in front of other colleagues will work wonders – everyone will be able to feel the value of their contribution to the team.

Don't forget about team events. Especially when the team consists of remote workers who are far from each other. For example, at Surf we remotely host not only various games, but also entire corporate events. So that those team members who cannot teleport from the other side of the world to the central part of Russia can take part in them and chat in an informal setting.

And just remember that a happy team is a productive team!

We use the main advantage of the “human factor”

Thanks to the human factor, we can take into account context and circumstances. We store much more information about the work process in our heads: we know the character traits of our colleagues and customers, the advantages and disadvantages of the processes adopted in working on the project. Therefore, when you need to make an important decision, it is worth considering not only the obvious factors that relate to solving the problem, but also the space in which the product is being developed.

To begin with, you can write them down in a simple list.

If you want to go further, you can create a project environment matrix. It should include the stack used on the project, describe the roles of team members and their strengths and weaknesses, customer expectations, quality of requirements and other factors important in a particular case. And the more serious the decision, the more important it is to take all this into account when making it.

That's all, but we will continue to study this issue: we will try to figure out “how to manage the human factor at work?” and what cognitive distortions do we not notice about ourselves? Stay tuned!