Last week I wrote about the value of finding issues early. How it becomes increasingly expensive and time consuming to fix issues the further down the development lifecycle you get. With that in mind we can now appreciate that anything we can do to find bugs earlier makes our software not only better but cheaper to develop.
Something we’re trialling at the moment are at desk demos. The idea is simple, before signing off a piece of work and passing it onto the next link in the chain (Dev to QA, QA to Support Analyst, Support Analyst to Dev and so on) you demonstrate the issue or feature to them.
For example, before I finish a feature and pass it onto someone who specialises in testing I invite my buddy over to “give it a bash”.
Remember last week? I talked about the time it takes to move from on link in this chain to another. I discussed how it can take a few hours to build your software, another hour or so to deploy it, and a day to run the signoff scripts (obviously this varies if you’re fortunate enough to be working on a ‘modern’ solution or have invested in some proper CI). Time moving backwards is time wasted, if you can avoid rework then you should always take the opportunity to do so!
By offering up my work to the QA for a few minutes before formally handing over can save hours of wasted time. These guys know what they’re looking for and can often find edge cases and give feedback on a few scenarios you’ve not considered. By having these pointed out to you early you’re saving all this extra time!
The same theory can be applied to a Support Analyst demoing bugs to a Developer rather than just recording replication steps on a ticket or a Developer showing a bug fix to the same analyst before shipping it to a customer’s UAT environment for testing.
So far it’s working well for us. Do you demo before handing over? Do you feel it works for your team?
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