An acronym for ‘Searchable Log of All Conversation & Knowledge’, Slack has redefined the way of working. It evolved from an organizational communication to a corporate community platform,
used by startups to large scale enterprises worldwide. It is specially loved by us developers.
We heavily use Slack at our startup and I as a side project, I decided to dig a little deeper into how we can optimize our Slack usage especially for testing. I started off by sending a mail to slack., to find out how their tool was improving testing, unfortunately they didn’t have the insights to help me.
So, like some tech detective I decided to dig a little deeper, here’s what I found.
From development strategy to deployment, SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) is tedious.
When you incorporate Agile and DevOps, managing everything at one platform? In your dreams mate! (sarcastic laughter).
Software development is like raising a child. No matter how much you try to perfect it, just like a human being has shortcomings similarly the software may have defects. Even after development it requires great care.
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Divided By Departments, United By Slack
Consider DevOps as a clockwork machine made of thousands of gears working together in synchronized way. If one part fails, the system goes down. Efficient collaboration is the key in making sure that your development efforts continue to work like a well oiled machine, and that’s where Slack comes in.
Slack was built to serve to break all the barriers of communication within a Corporate team. imagine your developer is in San Francisco and you are in Los Angeles. Slack allows the the whole organization come closer and move forward together with transparency. Feels good to know that even your CEO is just a click away.
Development , Automation testing, Build deployment, QA are all cogs that keep the Software development running. To ensure this you need continuous and comprehensive system of feedback.
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Tester’s Best Friend
Software Testing will definitely test your patience. STLC (Software Testing Life Cycle) can be greatly optimized using slack. It becomes easier for the senior QA to keep an eye on the whole process. It was interesting that while brainstorming about the Test environments and Test cases, Slack comes in handy. Testing is like walking through landmines but instead of avoiding them, you must trigger them all. ‘Organize’ is the key word, Slack streamlines your workflow.
Slack integrates all the aspects, be it developer-tester interactions or customer-developer interaction, all the data in the workplace can be managed by this tool.
In case of big organizations where testers and developers are situated far away, even in all this chaos Slack helps keep track of everything and everyone.
During my research I discovered that one of the biggest reason behind its success is simply the large no. of 3rd party services and community built integrations that helped testers by opening the gates to a whole new world.
JIRA
Put it this way, if JIRA was a girl testers would die fighting for her. It is a brilliant tool that enables our one click bug logging here at LambdaTest. Combining with Slack it is child’s play to keep track of all the issues and their progress.
Assume person X and Y are assigned different bugs, and X fixes it first. Now Y will be notified about the fix and there is a slight chance that he finds the answer to his problem in X’s code.
Time to throw another big word at you, ‘Synergy’.
Trello
Trello is purely management tool which, with its addictive UI, helps you breakdown the whole task and then as a whole assign them to different departments. Side by side keeping track and detailed analytics regarding the process as a whole.
Slack-bots
The addition of bots in Slack made a lot of testers fall in love with it. In a world of social media where bots are considered nothing but nuisance, Slack has welcomed bots with open arms. There is a reason, they are AMAZING!
You can configure them to do tasks like scheduling meetings, keep track of the existing tasks, assign them simple tasks like reminding everyone about the status updates about the Bugs already logged in.
These bots bring automation in notification system that enables you to keep track of almost everything.
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Conclusion
One of my teammates recently had an interesting interaction with a super experienced guy from Envato. His exact words were “I wake up early in the morning and go to work in Slack”.
To survive you have to adapt to your surroundings, flexibility signifies life.
Slack provides such an extensive app directory and also specialized plug-ins. Slack is to Organisations, what Robin is to Batman.
I was quite shocked at the lack of proper data regarding the slack usage, I urge all the Slack lovers to post their relevant stories online so people find even better ways to use Slack.
We at LambdaTest use Slack and it has been pretty helpful. I would like to thank the Tech team for bearing my stupid questions while
I was writing this blog. Also, Lambdatest also helps you perform Selenium testing, Cypress testing, Playwright, End to end testing at scale.
Tell us about your experiences in the comment section.
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