How test IO helps amplify distributed teams

As we have all learned in 2020 – ensuring that your team can work remotely is no longer a luxury – it’s a means of survival. While this impacted certain industries more than others, there was a standard theme shared amongst all – companies must have the tools in place to enable lean, distributed teams to perform at the highest level.  

While we serve a broad variety of industries, we are firmly rooted in technology. Being a distributed team ourselves - split between Germany and the US (plus thousands of distributed freelancers globally) - we have built test IO to enable distributed teams, including our own. 

In short, test IO is a cloud-based product for software testing that provides access to thousands of testers and devices globally at any given time. For newly-distributed teams, this can solve multiple issues. One, the need to scramble for access to device banks that may be in an office location – and rendered unusable while working from home is mandated. Two, the coordination that goes into organizing employees to perform the manual testing needed to verify the release readiness of your build. 

This begins with things like Slack and Jira, both of which our platform shares native integrations with. For teams struggling with release readiness visibility in a distributed setting, test IO allows you to directly feed release readiness direct in-channel with notifications for Critical/High blocker type issues. 

How does one institute quality by process in a distributed setting?  

Besides establishing baseline quality standards such as developers writing unit tests and building up a set of integration tests, you can use your CI/CD too to call upon test IO automatically once a build is ready in staging. Whether this trigger is set up directly from your CI/CD tool using our Rest API, or through a Jira-based workflow we can take the pain out of coordinating and executing the manual side of your regression suite -exploratory or test-case based. 

Out-of-the-box integrations are available for all common CI/CD platforms, Bug Trackers, and Test Case managers. Plus, if it's not on our list, we'll build it. 

Going beyond test IO’s proficiency in Exploratory Testing and Test Case Execution, we help close the cycle with Bug Fix Confirmation. Bug Fix Confirmation allows your developers to request a fix verification directly from within their bug tracker of choosing (soon available natively within our Jira Plugin). Fix Verifications are returned within as little as 10 minutes, allowing developers to code without interrupting their workflow while test IO handles the pain of retesting. 

Under the fire of adaptation, many leaders have had to address visibility into their team's efforts.

In response to customer requests for more visibility into the depth and breadth of what test IO was enabling their teams to achieve, we rolled out a new Metrics visualization in the test IO customer dashboard. This allows teams, on-demand, to grab metrics around issues identified, device coverage, tester participation and even a leaderboard for testing activity completed by your team.

In response to the business environment changes in 2020, everyone is being asked to do more with less. Implementing a mix of process, tooling, and visibility will help your team drive the results they need to – amplifying their abilities and covering any bottlenecks that lean team environments may otherwise cause.

If you’d like to hear how test IO could help your team, drop us a line here.