The world is in a race to make lives easier. Promising a good experience comes with the added baggage of promising quality. And as keeping promises go, Quality Assurance is not always perfect.
But one can strive.
Quality Assurance is not an isolated concept with a uniform checklist template handed out to businesses when they register. It spans across industries with a few standardized protocols open to execution as businesses see fit. When it comes to software, however, software testing takes the front wheel when it comes to assuring quality.
Test Strategy Mishaps
Testing is more often than not, imperfect. Identifying the mistakes that one has made is the first step. Solving them comes later on. The extent of a test strategy inadvertently speaks of the quality of the solutions.
Although, there is no one thing that can go wrong with one’s test strategy. There are too many. Let’s look at a few for now.
The Silo Effect
Developers find it difficult to adjust to a structure where each phase of the software solution developed is tested at the earliest. A lack of understanding of developers’ operations, requirements, and processes put the testers in a bind trying to identify the bugs and even create tests cases for the same.
Breaking out of the silo structure and following an agile process keeping collaboration on top is the way to go. Streamline workflows, reduce back and forth, and encourage developers and testers to work together by conveying the need for the same – the quality of the bigger picture.
Gauging Tester’s Performance
An age-old strategy, but a strategy nonetheless, is to measure a tester’s performance by the number of bugs they detect. Higher intensity bugs and errors slip away from notice as testers are only looking to reap benefits themselves with no regard for the quality.
The solution is a no-brainer - throw out performance measurement based on bugs found out the window. Within an agile cross-functional set up, teams must set clear benchmarks on the quality standards they are looking to achieve. KPIs must be tracked to ensure they are being met and to further optimization of the QA strategy.
The Endless Cycle
Regression tests are an indispensable part of a SDLC. However, triggering an exhaustive regression test every time a code is committed to the main trunk is impractical to say the least. While executing a test strategy teams can often find it difficult to decide on ‘when to stop testing’. Without this, teams would fall into a spiral and never stop testing, all the while accentuating the testing costs.
Prioritizing changes for regression tests can help testers move away from the endless cycle. Set guidelines and checklists to decide which change goes on to regression and which don’t.
Struggling with User Stories
User stories is what defines the usage of an application feature from the point of view of the targeted user. Outlining user stories is beneficial for the development team as well as the testers. However, since they are stories can quite often be misinterpreted or just not enough.
User stories could be too long diluting the agenda behind the story. It becomes unclear as to what the user specifically wants, making it difficult for testers to chalk out test cases. Many a times, there are not enough user stories, which leaves gaping holes in the test coverage.
Leaning on user-centric approaches for testing would alleviate teams from the turmoil of struggling with user stories. This way, since the user is at the epicenter of product development user stories would seldom be overlooked.
Testing at the end of build
Software professionals indulge in testing to promise quality solutions to their customer base. Any misalignment in the process of testing or Quality Assurance pulls the team back a couple of days or months in successfully delivering the solution.
Among other mistakes, testers often only begin testing after build. Which is problematic to say the least. Identifying a hiccup or bug and then rectifying it only becomes difficult the further away testers move from coding. Code quality, licensing, compliances and such would be challenging to adhere to if testing is moved after build.
To avoid this chaos, it is best to continuously test in the SDLC process, starting from the code.
Partner Up
Businesses already have enough and more on their plate with delivering their offerings, maintaining relationships with customers and employees alike. In the haste to upgrade their operations, it is often the case that QA takes a backseat owing to it being time and resource hogging.
The wise route is to partner with a trusted and experienced enterprise solutions expert. This way businesses need not run through every step of Quality Assurance with a fine comb to make sure it matches the expected KPIs. Without having to handhold their internal teams, they can sit back while their partners take up the grunt work of optimizing and delivering on the promise of quality.
Connect with QA experts at info@nalashaa.com to chart and execute impeccable quality.
