Since 2011, I have been in too many projects and my main activities were to create, deliver and provide data from Grid-Tools Datamaker to the Testing team. All the communication flow was only by email to request different types of data such as new customers, new brands, materials and so on.
The most common problem I had was that there was a wasting time in getting feedback about some missing details on the data requests, or when the business rules were invalid, etc. Considering all this and the final date to get it into production was very tight, the TDM team was in a serious problem, any of these problems sound familiar to you?
From the side of the Testing team, the person who will create the data request must have the knowledge of what is asking for. Sounds very logical all of this, but happens more often that you could imagine; this situation occurs when you have several teams in different parts of the world or with different time zones. Even sometimes the tester does not have any clue of what is requiring, so, how it would be possible to know the data delivered is right or wrong? Or, the same data request has been requested 2 o more times. All of these make delays to get the data into production, or a new release and of course lost tons of money.
From the side of the TDM team, the person who will create the data requested, also has to know the business rules. The TDM analyst must be sure that the data delivered comply with all the requirements avoiding break any constraints, duplicate data or anything similar as all of these kind of issues.
But how exactly you can organize and improve your requests?
- Make sure the data you are requiring complies with the business rules.
- Verify the data you are requiring has not been requested before.
- Be as descriptive as you can be, even if that sounds very logical.
A very useful tool is ….JIRA.
First of all, what is JIRA?
The product name JIRA is not an acronym, but a truncation of Gojira, the Japanese name for Godzilla. It has been developed since 2002 and is a proprietary issue tracking product, developed by Attlassian. It helps with bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management functions.
Tasks, ideas, and requests are hiding in documents, people’s heads, and deep in your inbox. Use JIRA to capture and organize your team’s issues, prioritize and take action on what’s important, and stay up to date with what’s going on around you.
JIRA makes all of this easy, so your team can spend less time managing the work and more time building great software.
Your process is at the heart of everything you do. Don’t shoehorn your team’s work into the default workflow defined by your project tracker.
JIRA has workflows to match your existing processes, that you can easily adapt as your team evolves. Use the tool that fits your team, don’t change your team to fit your tool.
On any team, it’s important that people can easily share information and reach out for help when they need it. JIRA’s simple, intuitive interface allows you to collaborate with teammates and get the job done more efficiently.
With JIRA, it got easier and faster to get a response from both sides. When a data request was created, it was directly put it on our plate, the TDM leader assigned the data requests for the TDM analysts, the analysts created the data and delivered directly to the person who was requiring the data and in case something went wrong, the tester had the communication directly with the TDM analyst avoiding to start the whole process again and saving a lot of time. Sometimes with the data delivered it helped to find out bugs and issues with the application. Using JIRA helped us to track data requests, the status of these data requests (Not started, In progress, Completed), productivity of the team and by analyst, defects, etc.
We were able to deliver all the required data, helped the Development team to fix the defects and saving a lot of time and money for all other teams.
