Testing knowledge base

From one company to another I've been seen that Test Teams have some problems with productivity and motivation.

There are a lot of reasons for these things:

• unclear requirements and job that needs to be done
  
• manual (monkey) job
• there is no progress in developing testing knowledges
• and so on

How my team and I overcome these obstacles?

Zone-Model and Study Groups.

Study Group is already described by me. So I would like to emphasize my attention to Zone-Model.


Key principles:
1. Test team is self-organized in one zone.
2. 10 hours for sharing activities per week for team in zone. Please note: there won’t inefficiency here because sharing activity will be performed in rotation by projects and hence always some project will have extra pair of hands and therefore benefits.
3. 10 hours is flexible and should be spread during week by team members. Workload and current tasks should be taken into account. Namely, team members should communicate each day and plan sharing activities. For example: Monday – 3 hours, Wednesday – 2 hours, Thursday – 2, Friday -  3 hours.
4. Monitoring is fulfilled by test manager.
5. Daily meetings for every zone to plan activities for current day and further days (~5-15m).
6. Retrospective each month to take actions and improvements (~1h). One of points to be discussed is changing team members between projects.

Risks:
1. Team members aren’t supported activities. Mitigation: Please see key principle 4, 5, 6.
2. Planning and estimation of future work isn’t done and hence impact on sharing activities. : Please see key principle 4, 5, 6.