At the moment, we have a heavy reliance on writing test cases held in a test management tool even though we work in agile and quite lean environment. Once written they are very rarely re-used and are not currently read by the rest of the team.
The IT dept are starting to move towards Trello, which I think will help us testing during the sprints and allow us to create more light weight tests (in whatever shape or form suits) for use by everyone during the sprint.
My concern is that we could end up losing the knowledge learned once our testing has been completed, so we need to capture that in an efficient way for easy access later on.
Would like to hear back on what other testers have done, or what tools you may have come across that could help.
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If you’re trying to deformalise, move down the chain. Leverage checklists and charter notes, and/or start taking screen recordings. The idea is to keep only what’s useful and/or make it cheaper.
Also, why do you want to keep the knowledge gained during testing? Ask yourself how much of your current stored testing knowledge isn’t so much knowledge as archived artefacts - if nobody knows it any more then it’s not knowledge, and if nobody uses it then it’s useless knowledge. Does it have a use-by date after which you’re just hoarding it? If you find that something’s going to be useful, like some diagram of a model you may want later, archive that separately into a wiki or shared drive or printed sheet or whatever. That way you’re making informed decisions on what to keep and throwing the rest away - that’s a pretty good process to trim down on wasteful documentation.
If you feel a sense of painful guilt about throwing away artefacts try instead to redirect that feeling towards expensive processes slowing down development to support an archive that nobody’s using.
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If you’re trying to deformalise, move down the chain. Leverage checklists and charter notes, and/or start taking screen recordings. The idea is to keep only what’s useful and/or make it cheaper.
That’s what I am trying to move the team towards doing, so that the artefacts we do create are more useful/relevant to the team.
Also, why do you want to keep the knowledge gained during testing? Ask yourself how much of your current stored testing knowledge isn’t so much knowledge as archived artefacts
At the moment, it is a question of artefacts being archived instead of knowledge retained - they’ve almost become a comfort blanket to some but are not used again just hoarded.
I have been considering the use of a wiki or shared drive as you suggest, so that if the team are asked questions later about a features behaviour or a new person joins the team we have something to refer back to.