We work in software development in the finance sector – releasing a new version of our software every quarter. Whilst we are developing a release, we take requirement submissions from multiple customer projects happening at the time, as well as requests from past customer projects that didn’t make previous releases.

During a 4-day period we work with the development team on stability of the system prior to putting it into production. An issue here is that in this short period we are totally inundated with 100’s of emails about defects raised, etc…and it quickly becomes hard tracking and making sense of all these conversations.

A better way than email to manage conversations between developers and testers – a better way to track the sudden surge in conversations and ensure as an individual I have not missed a conversation or been left out. We use a technical tracking system to track defects, but it’s the conversations between progress stages that needs to be consolidated (and in a non-technical language that makes sense to me).

Creating a channel in a Team for each release called ‘Stability’ where we can initiate and track these conversations.

It takes under 1 minute to retrieve the latest conversation about testing our code stability. I go from the usual 100+ to zero emails about this phase of our release – and less meetings.