All Hands on Deck

“something that you say when everyone’s help is needed, especially to do a lot of work in a short amount of time”

Every once in a while in our company.. we get everyone to come test for us. We include developers, business analysts, other product testers, support and marketing people, etc. We call it our party day, set up a training room, get lots of food, have lucky draws and prizes. Its a party day for testing. You come in, test any area of the products and log defects.

This helps with

1. Getting everyone in the organization an opportunity to know the product.
2. Get people involved in doing things that are not planned or scripted. We give them description of the role they want to use and let them free. They can explore and create their own tests. When they find a defect they have to document the steps to recreate it.
3. Give other team members an opportunity to understand what we testers do on a day to day basis.
4. Helps with cross training other team members on our product so when there is a crisis and we want all hands on deck we can approach these team members.
5. Give support line, marketing, help desk people to try things they hear customers are having issues with and help them log those issues, so testing can keep an eye on those features or areas when doing regular testing.
6. Able to log defects in areas that testers may not usually get a lot of time testing or play with.
7. Give testers a chance to observe and learn from other team members.
8. Helps with team building.
9. Everyone has fun and it really helps to take a break once in a while.

So for us all hands on deck is really a fun day to experiment and innovate.

What do you do in your organization that is different and has helped your test team?