Yeah, basically a team of devs will have to test their branch a bit, before merging it. Like @andrewkelly2555 says, step back often as a tester. If they want you to help them, help them, if not, just wait for it to get into a release or dev branch. You cannot manually test branches as part of routine process, it’s not cost effective. Before you manually test a branch, be sure that it is “deployable” first. Your CI/CD or build system needs to tell you if the deliverables can be “installed” or deployed or provisioned if it’s a services/web app. Manually testing a thing that did not install 100% right is time waste. So you do need some automation giving you a green light up front.
All that checking in branch does is “shift-left”, it’s good to do it if possible, but the only time you really need manual QA coverage is when branches have integrated into a delivery stream or branch, typically that is called “development” branch.
More on shift left:
- Exploratory Testing Week - Challenge 1 - Shifting Left - #7 by lgibbs
- Ideas on how to gently introduce a scrum team to TDD or shift left
In fact this opens up a huge conversation about branching strategy. but yeah, you don’t want to test branches if you can help it until they are ready to merge (in which case you only test the feature, and ignore regressions) or have merged… because it’s possible to find regressions in a feature branch that will get resolved when they merge with another feature branch that might be delivering the other end of a bridge API for example. So if I do test a branch, I only test the changes in the branch for smoke or obvious things. On-Branch testing is exploratory. To avoid changes that come from other branches being missing when you test a branch, always ask.
As for being remote or in different time zones, this needs to fit into your strategy. If the tester is not participating in the daily standup meetings, and not attending the bug grooming and sprint planning, then the tester is not “on the team”, and it’s practically pointless to try shift left and do branch based development and test.