Software development is a rather complex process where mistakes cannot be avoided. Testing is used to identify and eliminate them in time. The world knows many examples of when this process needed more attention and the project ultimately failed. Today we want to give some tips on making testing more efficient and avoiding possible problems.
1. Awareness
Your QA team should be well aware of the need for testing, and this issue should be approached as responsibly as possible and with a complete understanding of all processes. The stages of testing should correspond to the corresponding steps in software development. When programmers create code, they already understand where errors can occur. Finding bugs early on can speed up software development and prevent new bugs from appearing in the future.
2. Quality assurance is a long process
Some developers believe testing is the last step before releasing a product to the world. This approach needs to be revised because testing should occur from the first stages of writing code and continue even after the project’s release. It will allow you to create a high-quality product, increase development speed and reduce costs. Practice shows that identifying and correcting errors at early stages is much cheaper than if testing occurs only at the last stage.
3. Determine what requirements your software needs to meet
Before you develop code, you need to understand what goals and objectives the project should solve for you and what standards it should meet. Developers and other stakeholders need to understand what the final product will look like. Software quality characteristics are divided into six criteria:
- Functionality;
- Reliability;
- Ease of use;
- Efficiency;
- Maintainability;
- Portability;
The main task of software QA services is to understand how your product meets the criteria which have been set before starting development. All requirements must be documented in advance, available to all team members and flawlessly executed.
4. Dedicated professionals
If you want a quality product, you must hire a person (or a group of people) to do the testing. They must have the necessary knowledge and skills to perform this work with high quality and in the required time frame. They must know all the development processes and requirements you set for the finished product. In addition, testers should establish contacts with developers because the testing process should occur in parallel with development, and programmers should fix the identified errors in time.
5. Test automation
Test automation has a vast number of benefits. It allows you to more quickly and efficiently find possible errors, almost completely cover the code and promptly analyze the result. These days about 80% of all tests should be automated.
Such tests are divided into several types:
- Unit tests;
- Component tests;
- Integration tests;
- Acceptance tests;
- GUI tests.
However, it would be best if you did not replace everything with automated tests. The fact is that modern tools cannot accurately model human behavior, so the user interface and some functions must be tested manually to understand how convenient it is for a natural person to use your product.
6. Communication with the team and stakeholders
Communication within the team and with the customer is a critical process in quality assurance. You need to maintain documentation describing all the edits you make to the program code. These papers should be available to all team members and stakeholders. In addition, it will be good if you regularly hold planning meetings to discuss possible errors and problems and discuss growth prospects and the distribution of responsibilities, taking into account KPI for testers and the tasks you set for yourself.
It would help if you also established communication between different departments. Even if you work remotely, specialists should be able to communicate with each other to ask questions if something is unclear, share experiences and distribute responsibilities together.
7. Added value for all
Employees of your company must understand the importance of testing and how it affects the customer’s profit. If a customer leaves because of a poor-quality interface, it negatively affects the costs that the customer can afford to ensure quality. So, due to lack of funding, the customer can understand expensive testers for less qualified interns and, in the worst case, refuse to test. It also works in reverse; if quality control specialists work well, the customer makes a profit and can spend more on it, which positively affects salaries and bonuses.
8. Improve and respond to change
The market does not stand still. Companies that can compete with you appear regularly, so you need to develop new services to attract more customers or retain existing ones.
The same goes for testing. New testing tools and techniques regularly enter the market to help make the product even better and more reliable. If you want your project to remain competitive, you need to improve constantly.
