If you're first getting into software testing, or if you've started a new job testing in a different industry, you probably have a lot of questions—about terms and jargon, expectations, requirements, and more. Hopefully your new team will answer some of them, but if you feel like you keep bugging them, there are ways you can learn and discover on your own.

The modern iterative software development lifecycle has developers checking in code to version control systems frequently, with continuous integration handling building and running automated tests at an almost equally fast rate. This can generate an enormous amount of test data. Here’s how you can ensure you are reporting results effectively across your team and realizing all the benefits of that information.

Code reviews are a popular method of catching bugs early in development through peer-reviewing someone’s code. But perhaps more important than catching bugs, these reviews also serve as a chance to see how something is built and have a conversation about it. Because testers question software differently from developers, it’s important that we participate in this knowledge-sharing practice.

We get it: Writing good, reusable, effective test scripts is hard. It consumes a lot of time and energy, and you have to learn too much about automated testing and test implementation. Just give up and produce some complicated, messy, and ineffective scripts! But why waste time figuring out how to do that on your own? Here are the best practices to ruin your BDD test scripts completely.