45 Questions Testers Can Ask When Joining a Project to Get Started
Just joined a project? This is a list of questions to get to know people, process, business, development, testing and operations.
Joining a project can be overwhelming. There are many unknowns and therefore much to learn.
This survey is designed to give you a structured starting point and some inspiration.
🧑 People
Who is responsible for your onboarding?
What are the roles within the project and what are your touch points?
What is expected of you?
What is expected of your team, department, and organisation?
♻️ Process
What are the (recurring) phases within the project and what are your responsibilities in these phases?
What methodologies and frameworks are used and how does that affect your work?
In terms of the development process, what is the history of the project?
What steps does a feature go through from the idea to the release?
Who is involved in these steps and how do they collaborate?
👨💼 Business
Who are the project's customers or stakeholders, and what are their challenges?
Who are not the project’s customer or stakeholders, and why?
How does the project make money?
Who are the competitors in the market?
What makes our project different from theirs?
How are requirements and use cases documented?
What are the most important features?
What are the most used features?
What are the most important initiatives now and in the near future?
Is the feedback from customers or stakeholders passed on to the development team?
What are the current challenges?
How can testing help?
👩💻 Development
What are the most complex and error-prone areas of the system?
Is there an architectural view of the system?
What are the dependencies within the system?
What are the dependencies outside the system?
What is the technology stack?
Can you access the code and version control system?
What are the current challenges?
How can testing help?
🧪 Testing
What environments can be used for testing?
What is the difference between these environments?
What tools are used to support testing?
What tools are used to support analysis or debugging?
How to handle findings?
How to create test data?
How is testing documented and who needs it for what?
What is the test automation strategy?
Who is responsible for what type or layer of automated tests?
What are the current challenges?
⚙️ Operations
How and when is a release deployed?
How does incident management work?
What is the technology stack?
What are the current challenges?
How can testing help?
⏰ Meetings
What regular meetings should you attend?
Feel free to choose the questions that best suit your project. I hope this list inspires you to ask even more questions to help you to get started.
Enjoy this exciting time full of unknowns, new opportunities and things to learn.
This survey is the first tool to make it into the toolkit and I am delighted to finally share it with you. I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me.
What questions have you found valuable when joining a project?
Happy learning,
Florian