Agile’s success is hugely dependent on early feedback. Getting the clients involved in quality assurance process is important to validate if they are in the right path of building the product. As a test lead I get stuck in dead-end meetings to clarify a dispute over written requirements or discuss the changes and bugs. Short software release cycles and their rapid pace have increased pressure on developers and testers to use their time more efficiently. Managing bugs, changes and improvements is hard when you are getting change requests from multiple sources . Software project management tools sound great in theory, but in practical are too complicated to use with non-tech savvy clients. With these tools time and money are wasted on training and the bugs are lost or forgotten.

With that in mind, I am always seeking for tools that could improve our process of bug tracking and reporting. zipBoard fits the bill very well and you would agree with me once you read through my reasons of why zipBoard is perfect for agile development.

1. KEEP EVERYONE ON THE SAME PAGE

Working in a distributed team often makes it difficult to communicate and collaborate efficiently. Agile does not require the team to be working in a same room. If the development team and the product owners are located in the same location there can be a close interaction within the team and with the client. This seems to be an effective technique but it is not practical. According to “State of agile 2016” survey conducted by “Versionone” more than 82% of the respondents had at least some distributed teams practicing agile within their organizations. Team members at different locations and time zones face communication challenges which might have a huge impact on productivity and quality.

John Kotter considers ‘lack of communication’ as one of the most common reasons for project failure. Geographically dispersed team often use low bandwidth communication channels, such as emails, instant messages, which leads to large amount of lost information and action items. Often there is misunderstanding regarding what another team member is doing and we miss important things. This could lead to, team going out of sync and not discovering it in time. You will have hard time to collect and organize the feedback from your users. Clients communicate their feedback in various ways like verbally or via emails, skype calls or through business analysts.

zipBoard makes your life easier by capturing all the feedback in the same place so that you don’t miss anything. zipBoard allows clients to collaborate on your in-progress product with simple threaded conversations.

Clients often spend time in explaining the changes by writing long emails. Writing long emails doesn’t mean you are getting more work done. Long emails often lead to misunderstanding which will eventually lead to rework. Skype calls may be a better option however too many meetings are all talk and no action. Too often, meetings go on aimlessly for hours and end up without any outcome.

zipBoard saves product team’s time by giving them a communication platform. So no more long email exchanges, just threaded conversation while browsing your product. With zipBoard, clients can create boards where the changes can be effectively communicated. Clients can annotate,draw or start a simple threaded conversation by pinpointing the exact change on the browser and assign a task to associated person. Clients can always switch between actual content and discussion boards. I assure that the clients and the team will be in love with this tool.

“ZipBoard lets you break the barriers between distributed teams.”

2. GET EARLY FEEDBACK

The main reasons for adopting agile over the traditional methodologies is to accelerate product delivery and to embrace the changes.

In case of agile models like Scrum, waiting until the requirements are finalized to start development is not practical. It is unrealistic to believe that meaningful requirements can be gathered in a single meeting with a customer. Requirements are abstract initially and will get much better in subsequent iterations, and the clients need to see and experience working software before they can confirm the requirements are correct. It’s like the chef tasting the soup in the process of cooking it, to ensure that the ingredients are added in the right amount. In the same way you need to ensure your customer gets a taste of your product in the development process.

Agile is not just about delivering software faster, it’s about delivering QUALITY software faster.

You can say that your product is DONE only after it is completely tested and meets the defined acceptance criteria .This means that at the end of each sprint, the team has produced a coded, tested and usable piece of software. Testing should start as early as possible.

The later you find defects, the more expensive they are to fix.

So it is crucial to ensure that the development team gets early feedback from clients and QA. With zipBoard the clients and testers alike can report the issues and improvements. Clients can see his product being built and provide feedback. This helps the development team to connect better with the clients and focus their efforts where it really matters. Clients can report issues by annotating right from the site being worked on.

The QA team need not have to wait till the end of the sprint to begin testing. With zipBoard testing can start as soon as there’s something to test. This helps you to prevent bugs rather than fixing them in the later stages.

“Agile is all about fast feedback. From a wireframe to fully developed website, zipBoard lets you get EARLY feedback in every step of the development process”

3. SAVE MORE THAN 50% OF YOUR TESTING TIME!

Testers spend more than half of their time in reporting bugs they encounter. When there is a lack of detail or confusion in the bug reports, developers need to request more information in order to understand and replicate the bug so the tester will have to invest more time to make the developers understand the bugs.

A potential solution is a visual representation of the bug. An image is worth a thousand words. Several Studies show that visuals are consumed by the brain much faster than text. Visuals are proven to be more effective than text at increasing a reader’s understanding and helps to retain the information for a longer time. The visual representation of the bug helps the developer understand the problem with ease thus eliminating the time needed to explain the bugs.

“ Its Simple — Don’t write just draw your bugs”

However testers often get frustrated with taking screenshots and later annotating and highlighting the area of the bug. At last upload it to the defect tracker. Think how tedious this task is, when screenshots have to be uploaded for every issue. From traditional bug trackers like JIRA, Bugzilla, Mantis, Redmine to simple Google spreadsheets, none of the tools address this issue.

“With zipBoard bug tracking is a breeze! ”

zipBoard assists testers to create comprehensive bug reports instantly and helps them to concentrate on testing rather than on reporting bugs. You can report bugs from within the browser and can pinpoint the exact issue without missing out the essential details in only few clicks. There is no need to switch to a bug tracker to upload the screenshot. Testers can annotate, comment, draw and the changes are visible to all the collaborators.

zipBoard is a must for every product team. Work smart to build products, faster and better!

So what are you waiting for? Signup for zipBoard today and get unlimited access for 1 month!