Keeping Testers Busy

There are two problems with testers that appear competing, but instinct tells me their not. One is keeping testers busy. Anyone who's spent any time testing knows the dreary periods of down time that lead (in my case, at least) to productivity hits when you need to be busy. The other is making sure testers have enough time.

The old maxim "If you fail to prepare, you plan to--" something or other is partly true, but the real problem is the busy work in testing. Testers waste a lot of time looking for bugs. They waste a lot of time in preparation, setup, and executing manual steps to get to the point where they can look for bugs. This is not a "let's automate everything" screed. The waste a lot of time planning how and where they're going to find bugs.

Wouldn't it be more efficient if they could just find the bugs and not waste all that time? Those puzzle games which you try to solve in the least number of steps comes to mind. I never really liked those games. Part of it is intuition, practice, understanding the architecture, limitations, functional ambiguity, the developers weaknesses, etc. -- that's what makes a good tester. As anything, experience is a good teacher. And part of it is planning. But most of it is just that it takes a lot of work, and if we knew the solution to the puzzle in advance, we wouldn't need to solve the puzzle (find the bugs.)

Automation can help, especially with setup and repetitive tasks. Taking away the repetitive or unvaluable tasks is great for morale, and keeps you alert so that you find more bugs. But the real problem I want to tackle is the downtime. Part of the answer to keeping testers busy is doing things like working on automation, preparing test data, gaining a further understanding of the requirements and the architecture, etc. All worthy goals.

I'm still reaching for what I want. It's more of the psychological problem. That you need to balance down time with stimulus and relaxation, as well as up time. How do I keep them -- not busy -- but productive when they're bored. Whether it's in downtime when they're surfing the web twiddling their thumbs, or crunch time when they're too busy to be productive, and too strained to be creative and find the bugs.

I had a glimmer of a thought earlier, but have lost it in the analysis. Anyway, I've made a few steps towards identifying the problem, so it's not time lost.