The success of any company depends on the quality of the deliverables and the client experience that it provides. And when it comes to delivering excellence in your product and services, the culture of the company plays a vital role. One thing that is common amongst many successful companies is that it is run by a strong culture. And by culture I don’t mean the office attire, the office furniture in the premises, or the language in which your employees communicate. Culture is what drives people to do what they do to deliver beautiful finished products. It is the sum of the individual behaviours of the employees in your organization who work towards a product by holding onto a few principles that are set as an organization.

Many enterprises these days are trying to understand the importance of a continuous testing culture and adopting it to provide the best products and services to our clients. They are able to do this by streamlining the testing process by adopting CI/CD pipelines, tools and DevOps strategy. Enterprises are keen on scaling up their efforts to deliver quality at speed. However, having a good testing strategy isn’t enough to consistently deliver quality without a compromise. It is vital for an organization to run on certain principles, practices, values and vision which culminate into the culture of the company. This blog addresses that very question as to what kind of testing culture we need to build as business leaders in our organizations?

Setting the Right Foundation

For any cultural shift or the framing of one, you would need the approval of your teams and leaders. You need people to come together to agree upon the way you work, buy into the culture that you will set to deliver a finished product. It is much like the framing of our constitution. A constitution is what governs our actions and ethics for as long as we live in a particular country. The shift in the mindset and the culture of any organization depends on clearly communicating the values and principles before we even demonstrate how this new testing culture pans out. 

Setting the right foundation and clearly communicating the expectations will help the teams in the organization to really plugin to the vision and adopt a certain culture. Paying salaries and getting the work done isn’t enough to become a great company. To become a great company you will need to be known for a certain ethic or culture. pCloudy strives for excellence with an entrepreneurial mindset, we thrive on being a part of the solution no matter what challenges we face. And this has been communicated to us clearly and that is what we do at our work, we excel by carrying the mindset of being a part of the solution and delivering excellence.

Nurture Experimentation and Innovation

The greatest inventions and breakthroughs in science are born because of experimentation and exploration. Imagine a world where scientists or just people were not given the grants to perform experiments or don’t receive the funding for their projects. Would we have witnessed the many inventions like the light bulb, weather forecasting, rubber, etc? I doubt it. Encouraging people to experiment is key for any innovation. 

In the technology space having a dedicated research and development team is surely a great idea, but imagine if you had all of your employees thinking like a scientist. Imagine the possibilities of innovations one could witness by just letting people carry a mindset of experimentation and innovation. Developing a culture of experimentation will allow the organization to not only scale up, but also explore endless possibilities and birth technological breakthroughs. Nurturing a mindset of experimentation in your organization will surely benefit the company in continuously creating new solutions to solve problems of the future. 

Encourage Collaboration

Many times an idea doesn’t scale up into an innovation due to the lack of collaboration. This can be a collaboration between teams within an organization or a collaboration between different organizations or partners, etc. A beautiful quote by Mother Theresa sums up the need for collaboration – “I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.” While Mother Theresa might not be a technological giant or a business stalwart, her words still echo the importance of collaboration. Encouraging inter-team projects and brainstorming gives birth to possibilities that may not have been possible if individual experts didn’t come together.

If Larry Page and Sergey Brin never came together, the Google we know today wouldn’t have been born. It is vital for organizations to be sharing ideas with one another and work alongside each other to bring out the best to the world. The same goes with the tools that we use, if not for integrations with other tools, being able to scale up our solutions and products would’ve been a challenge for many of our users who use multiple tools for different functions. One of the recent integrations at pCloudy was possible because of two spectacular continuous testing products coming together to solve the problem of app data management. Bringing Bitrise and pCloudy has now allowed individuals to save time in uploading and downloading the apk or ipa files to test on devices. If this integration wasn’t possible we would still be wasting a lot of our time on the mindless tasks that could have been automated. But thanks to this integration, we were able to bring about an impactful change.

Empower Individuals

Instilling a spirit of curiosity is vital for individual employees to constantly upgrade their skills and learning. Building a culture where people can share their knowledge and experience helps organizations to breed field experts who bring excellence and perfection. Allowing employees to test and explore new fields makes your teams more proficient in the work they do. While development teams and testing teams have their specific roles and responsibilities to fulfill, encouraging teams to learn from one another appreciates the work that each individual does and opens up opportunities for collaboration and exploration. Learning from each other also trains your employees to think from different perspectives to come up with the right solutions or approaches.

Shared Responsibility

In continuous testing each and every step of the CI/CD Pipeline is important and essential. And at the same time, no one step is more important than the other. Similarly, every team shares the responsibility for the success of the product right from development to the deployment of the app. There is no room for Siloes in continuous testing and hence every team is equally responsible to maintain the quality at every step. Every team member shares the responsibility to ensure the quality at every step of the CI/CD Pipeline. And every team member takes pride in the success of the product. Building the culture of shared responsibility distributes the burden of working towards a common goal and shares the joys of victories when a product is deployed successfully. Every team member becomes equally responsible for providing the best possible outcome at every step.

Data over Opinions

Gone are the days where the boss has the final say. We live in a world where decisions are now based on facts and data rather than a mere hunch or a bag of opinions. Enterprises have understood the importance of making data driven decisions and invest heavily on data analysts to tell them what to do. Test data plays a key role in helping us make the right decisions to implement strategies or adopt a certain practice. And testing is all around us. In marketing you can test to see if a particular change in the subject line of an email campaign changes the click or open rate, or change the medium of communication to a video or landing page to see what performs better to get a further reach. In UI/UX design you can test to see if changing the size of a button or mode of entry into a field makes a difference to your users. Keeping a close eye on the metrics that matter the most help you make the right decisions to change things around or test new strategies. And when change is backed by data, you can never go wrong.

Conclusion

Building a new culture of testing into your organization doesn’t happen overnight and will take a lot of time. However, with the right mindset, constant communication and the right practices it is possible. We hope these few pointers will help you improve the culture of your organization for the better and help you scale up your testing efforts as an organization. Do write to us in case of any questions or clarification at support@pcloudy.com. We’ve also attached a helpful whitepaper that sheds light on how digital testing and multi-experience apps are enhancing Consumer Experience, feel free to follow the link and download your free copy.