Developing software always involves dealing with unknowns. Unanticipated issues and changes always tend to creep in during development. But how do you deal with the unknown when planning your sprints? How do you handle unforeseen bugs? In this episode we’ll Test Talk with Kinga Witko, who’ll offer some tips for dealing with the unknowns, accessibility testing and more.

About Kinga Witko

Kinga is a Professional Quality Evangelist, experienced in testing data warehouse, web and mobile applications, with an ability to ruin every ‘bug-proof’ application. She is also a blogger, conference speaker, and singer. Kinga is also interested in user experience and its implementation in making great applications and agile software development.  Currently, Kinga is focused on accessibility testing and how we can improve software in order to make them accessible for everyone.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Call center testing is quite demanding because you have to think about a lot of things. Not only on the web browser part but also phone calls connections. You might also think as a tester what kind of users and where your call center that will be located. Because a lot of testing depends on the location of the exact call center. There will be different regulations for example by law. Its different in Europe compared to the U.S. and it’s all influence the testing.
  
• People don’t think about their software their products as a whole but tend to divide it into parts like I do my features now and maybe some little improvements here and there as a separate sprint for example. Then they say Now we are dealing bugs and we have to estimate them and estimate our time for them. Like their bugs are something completely different from their functionalities which is probably wrong. Because I always think about software as a whole.
  
• I think this is a good tip I received also from very experienced project managers some time ago that you should always keep in mind that you should have 25/30 percent of each task each development task for something which is unexpected and it doesn’t have to be just for bugs.
  
• When the whole team takes care of quality time matters of course but they can take the risk that they deliver less with a good quality and they will be comfortable with the quality of the product.
  
• It should start from the beginning of the project because that you state what you would like to deliver what you would like to obtain in the end. That’s why I like agile approach. I like doing things in Scrum sometimes in Kanban because it gives you a feeling that you know the direction and if it’s a necessity for change you just change. You have the capacity for change.
  
• I would recommend every tester regardless of it they do automated or manual testing — to do exploratory testing. To get along with exploratory sessions and to try to just think out the box. Because I find my exploratory sessions really refreshing and each of them can be completely different because it’s just a matter of subject to choose. You’d just stick yourself to some path, you would like to obtain something, but you didn’t know how. So you just explore and see what happens. So I think this is a great exercise to do from time to time. Maybe not on a daily basis but it helps improve the product quality.
  

Connect with Kinga Witko

• Twitter: @kingatest
• Blog: kingatest.wordpress.com
• LinkedIn: kingawitko

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