We’ve all been there. Developers are still coding, the board is quiet, there are no tickets that could be tested, no releases pending, no one is asking for a regression run…. Maybe a lot of the people from the team are on vacation, which is common during the summer period or the winter holiday season, so the work is slowed down… And you may think that there is nothing to do or to test today.
But, there is always something to test. Always.
If there isn’t a feature to test, there are dozens of ways you can contribute to the product’s quality, improve the process, or build yourself as a QA professional. Basically, you can use these “slow” moments as opportunities for you and for the project.
Here are a couple of ideas on what to do during those quiet times:
Explore the Product 🔍
You can take the time to explore the app like a curious user and do a little bit of exploratory testing. Because you have time, you can now be more creative and think about some scenarios or edge cases that you didn’t try before. Also, you can pick some part of the app that is rarely tested and use this time to explore it and check if everything is working fine there.
You’ll often find surprising behaviors that didn’t surface during normal test scenarios.
Report all the issues that you found and inform the team.
Also, you can make a list of the scenarios that you tried. After that, you can add some of them to the list of all test cases, you can use them in the next testing, etc.
Clean Up and Improve Your Test Cases 🧹
Quiet time is good to take a look at your test cases and check their quality. You can review them and see if they are up to date, are they clear and easy to follow, are there any that need to be updated, are there any steps that can be simplified, are there any scenarios that you know that are not documented, etc.
This will help you in the future when you are using them. You will be more confident and sure that the test cases are up to date, improved, and that they are providing good test coverage.
Improve Test Documentation 📝
Even though this is not the most interesting thing to do (at least for me 😄), it is useful to use this time to review and update any test documentation that you have. That may be the Test Strategy, Test Plan, Testing Report Templates, Bug Templates, Onboarding Documents, Checklists, etc.
This is useful because when you need them, you will know that those documents are reviewed and up to date. They will not be just outdated documents that have lost their purpose over time because they are not up to date.
Create New or Optimize the Automation Tests ⚙️
You can use the quiet time to add more automation tests to your test suite. Also, you can improve your framework structure, you can optimize the existing tests (like fixing flaky tests, fixing tests that were not working, improving the test steps, etc.)
If you still don’t use any automation tool, you can explore which tools you can use for your product, or you can start automating some small, basic scenarios, to see how it will go before you use it regularly.
Go Through Past Bugs or Production Issues 🕑
It is very useful to go through the old bugs or production issues to see what was missed during testing. This will give you ideas for scenarios that you can use in future testing. You can add those scenarios in the test cases or the automation suite and use them to prevent those bugs from happening again.
Use this time to learn something from those bugs that will help you in the future.
Explore Other Testing Areas 🛠️
If you already have some established performance and security tests, you can review them, and you can explore different scenarios to see how the app behaves in terms of performance and security.
If you don’t have such tests, you can explore what kind of tools you can use, check whether they will be going to be beneficial for your project, you can try some of them, etc.
Invest in Yourself 📚
The quiet time is a great room for you to grow. You can use this time to read QA articles of blog posts, watch tutorials that can help you, experiment with new tools, watch courses that will help you in your work, etc. After that, you can present what you have learned to the team.
This will keep you inspired, you will learn something new, you will evolve, and you will get new ideas.
As you can see, there is always something to do, even though no one handed you something to test today. By doing some of these ideas, you will definitely bring more value to the project, to the team, and also to yourself.
