1: Reduce non-testing activities
I’d say that every second you spend writing notes, capturing evidence, writing bug reports and so on is time taken away from your testing. Your easiest saving might be in taking fewer notes, for example. I’d look at what’s mandated and why - process improvement might mean that the savings on fewer notes outweigh the benefits of taking them.
2: Reduce limitations on non-testing activities
The less prescriptive a system is the better. Testers should do whatever works for them as much as possible. Restrictions on file formats and technologies mean that a tester may have to work with a system they don’t like or doesn’t fit their methods. Forcing certain tools on craftspeople is bad and you should do it no more than is necessary.
3: Determine what you can change
Now you know what you need to capture and what restrictions you need to work with - but you might be able to change those restrictions if you have a better idea. For example if you’re told to upload all the files one by one to an internal website form and you need to upload notes, documents, a video, screenshots, bug report links and whatnot it would be easier to copy them all to a shared drive under an auto-generated folder name and software can do the rest - but that involves not using the form you’re told to use so you’ll have to go to the manager with that, and it involves having access to a shared drive across the test team (plus anyone else who needs access to those files) which would involve working with the IT & ops sides of things.
4: Try new things
When you’re settled down between what you changed and what you can’t change then it’s time to look at ways to improve things just for yourself.
The way I used to do things is take a template I made in OneNote, make that into a new page in OneNote, take all my notes there, paste any screenshots there, turn the whole thing into a PDF and attach it to the story in JIRA. I found LICEcap through another tester, so asking around is a good way to find tools you might use. Some tools depend on what I’m doing, sometimes screen capturing is a useful thing to do. Sometimes I had tools that could dump information to files to expose the internals of the software, or working with things like wireshark that have exports. I think it’s a good thing to have a mishmash of tools for this sort of thing - small tools that do very little but very well that are suitable for purpose and low-friction are important. It’s tempting to want to pool them together but I find anything that says it does a lot usually does at least some of those things in a way I find annoying if not unusable. Because I like lots of niche and custom tools most of them are unsuitable for anyone not doing the same thing I’m doing.
Things I like that I’d suggest to someone else
Some of these might be out of date by now, but you can use the ideas to find a replacement
OneNote - my favourite note taking tool
Notepad++ - find in files feature is nice
LICEcap - low friction screen capture tool for taking animated GIFs of parts of the screen. Great to communicate how to recreate a problem, or provide believable evidence of a problem.
WinMerge - for highlighting differences in files, useful to compare logs or see what changes happened in other files.
FRhedit - same thing but for hex values
Excel/Google Sheets - data processing and visualisation
Xmind - my mindmapping tool of choice
Baretail/Kiwi - a nice log tailing tool with customisable colours, letting you highlight errors in a log on the fly or better show message types
InCtrl5 - This is probably out of date now, but it would take snapshots of folders and the windows registry and show you any differences. Useful to track system changes.
slipsum.com - a site to generate lorem ipsum text except that is uses profanity-laden quotes from Samuel L Jackson.
Spy++ - This used to come with Visual Studio and was good for watching windows messages
Most of these tools have some capture system or export system to get this information more easily into your notes and make it simpler to report on them.
Other advice
There are a bunch of full screen recorders out there that could replace the need for taking notes on what you actually did with a video of it. Although that won’t capture why you’re doing it it will mean that you can just timestamp your notes and then have a file showing exactly what you did.
You can automate some of the problems away. For example if you have a way to scrape your notes for timestamps you can autofill metadata about your session - just be careful that automating away your attention doesn’t lead to more problems.
Templates are a nice way to reduce the amount of stuff you have to write every time, and act as a reminder.
Checklists are a nice way to remember what you have to do after a session. I had one in a template that included things like “get this session reviewed”, “Report all problems” and “upload PDF to story” which I’d have to check off to finish the session. It’d also have a section called “Environment” where I’d write the area of the system I was working in and what version I was looking at.
