Learning from mistakes

Imagine you are working as an SDET in your sprint tasks and you fail. You made a mistake. You, the person responsible for application tests, the person which needs think on strategies to reduce and eliminate defects. The smartest quality person. What should you do in this situation? First thing: keep calm, you are human. Unfortunately humans fail. Now, follow some suggestions to proceed in this case:

1. Analyze: I suggest you communicate with your Dev Lead (or any thecnical person responsable for the application) and your PO(or the person close of Business/Customer) about the problem. Now, as a team, You can talk, track and analyze the problem impact. This is the moment to undesrtand what is the problem impact and who was impacted,
2. Inform: Communicate impacted people about the problem, providing all information need, Inform your team has worked to mitigate the problem, and start a strategy for this problem doesn’t occur again,
3. Reduce Damage: If applicable, work to fix the problem damage. Sometimes the impact could be remediate fast,
4. Root Cause: If there is no remediation, work to find the root cause of the problem. Explain for your team members the steps to simulate the problem and the impact. I suggest you involve more people to talk about the problem and find the root cause. Bellow some tecnics to find root cause of problems:
   * Fishbone/Ishigawa Diagram
   * 5 Whys
5. Solution Brain Storm: After to find the root cause, talk with your team about possible sollutions for the problem. Collect all ideas in a brain storm session,
6. Select a Solution: You have now, the problem, the root cause and possible solutions. As a team, select the better solution for your scenario. Sometimes the team will select the faster, or the cheaper. there is no silver bullet. The team should select the solution which fit for your scenario,
7. Fix the problem.

You can ask me: Aguirre, Is necessary follow all this steps only because one problem I Did? My answer for you is: Yes, you need follow. Follow some reasons for my answer:
* Learn with the problem,
* Prevent other team member to not follow this steps,
* Map risks in your application/process,
* Have many solutions for the problem

You can be the best SDET or tecnical professional in your company. And problably you can find the root cause and a solution alone for the problem. But if you do this alone, you ‘ll lose the opportunity to enrich the discussion. If you made some mistake, other people could do the same… and working as a team, you can work to prevent similar problem.