A well-established QA process marks a certain standard that your product is adhered to. Tiny issues that slip away as the result of obscurity can damage your reputation severely – something you can’t afford in the modern-day realities of fierce competition.
Most business owners name the lack of resources (budget and people) as one of the most common issues in establishing proper quality assurance. However, we believe it all comes down to strategy and implementation, which are the definition of quality in software testing.
Knowing best testing practices and tools is beneficial, unquestionably. At UTOR, however, we prioritize building effective operational workflows and establishing testing focuses – that’s our secret ingredient. Here’s how we do it.
Plan Properly to Avoid Wasting Time
Three pillars are there to help you build effective testing strategies: test plan, test strategy, and test cases. And you need those to make sure your QA team operates as it should.
A test plan is your mission statement: it outlines the scope of work, testing approaches, schedule, and your ultimate goals. It’s something that’s produced in the form of documentation at the preliminary stage of software testing.
A test strategy is your underlying set of principles that provide instructions and guidelines for how software testing must be performed. The test strategy is a referencing point for the QA engineers. Here are key differentiators to help you get your head around whether you need a test plan or test strategy.
| Test plan | Test strategy | |
| The main focus | Project specifications | Project guidelines |
| Responsible person | Testing manager or team lead | Project manager |
| Defined at | Project level | Organization level |
| Can it be altered at the later stages? | Yes | No |
A test case is a specific course of action that a QA engineer carries out to test a particular feature or functionality. Here is how it works.
First, you need to write a testing scenario that is a high-level definition of a certain testing task. It can be rather broad, so you need to break it down into specific test cases. Your test scenario can be something like “check the inquiry form on the landing page.” Now since there are many possible ways to do so, the following test cases can be specified:
- check the system’s response on entering empty input fields;
- check the system’s response on entering an invalid User Name;
- check the system’s response on entering an invalid User Email;
Using a well-established test plan, test strategy, and test cases is paramount to ensure your project stays on schedule and budget.
Involve QA as Early as Possible
Involving the QA team at the later stages might seem logical at first glance (is it not why we have a testing stage, followed after development in the traditional SDLC?).
However, it definitely feels wrong from the QA perspective. After all, it’s all about operational effectiveness, as we previously mentioned. That means that when the QA team finally steps in, it literally has to set up everything from scratch and overcome the process lag. That can result in unexpected delays (something that every client hates!).
Adopt DevOps
Software testing is done easier within the Agile environment, and it naturally fits DevOps. According to Atlassian, almost two-thirds of technical companies adopted some DevOps practices to various extents by 2020, and this trend is predicted to grow even further.
Using testing stages in Agile SDLC, you release updates in shorter cycles – more time for repeated testing and catching bugs before they make their way into production. Agile testing finds bugs every six minutes on average, unlike in the traditional SDLC environment. Also, you don’t leave software testing for the last moment (something we, as QA specialists, find extremely stressful!).
UTOR encourages everyone to adopt continuous development and deployment principles to the software development process in order to utilize QA to its full potential. Having a release pipeline improves testing time and deployment – we covered that in our articles on the CI/CD benefits.
Enable Interdepartmental Collaboration
One could argue that the adoption of DevOps practices is the enabler of interdepartmental collaboration: the main idea behind DevOps is breaking down silos and achieving a “frictionless, fluent, and resilient” organizational structure.
The key to building effective collaboration between the departments is having your teams on the same page. However, that can be achieved via proper communication tools (people won’t use communication channels they dislike, no matter how much you want them to). So play with some platforms like Trello, Wrike, Asana, or Jira – and ask what your employees think about them.
Drive Organizational Changes
So how is the role of testing in software quality assurance important exactly? Well, it cannot be the sole responsibility of the QA team (at the end of the day, they’re not the ones who produce the code). So here are some additional organizational changes you can bring to improve the quality of testing:
- Stick to programming principles. Object-oriented programming (OOP) uses principles such as “single responsibility,” “tightly,” and “loosely coupled objects,” SOLID, to name a few. Knowing which principle is applied in programming makes software testing significantly easier;
- Get developers to accept responsibility. This is also known as test-driven driven development (TDD), when developers create tests to check the code they produce. However, this approach requires a high level of expertise from the development team as they need to be able to understand user cases and user stories profoundly.
- Manage your technical debt. There are two ways you can go about developing something: do it quickly and refine the details later or do it slowly and pay attention to everything at once. However, the first approach creates a backlog of things that are “due to” or otherwise known as technical debt. In reality, though, most of the development teams often stay somewhere in the middle, leaning towards one or another approach.
Build a Mature QA Team
You can get away with one tester for small-scale projects for sure. At UTOR, we sometimes get this kind of question “Do we really need a team of that size for our project?”. And our typical reply is, “Well, if you have a development team of 5-10 people, how can you expect a single QA specialist to handle all the testing?”. It’d be safe to say that the QA team should roughly match the size of the development team.
So for medium- and large-scale projects, you’d need a QA team that consists of at least five members: QA engineer, test analysts, test architect, test manager, and QA team lead. You can learn more about their roles and responsibilities in our dedicated article.
It’s easier to build entire remote teams nowadays with the help of partners like UTOR: you can have your QA needs covered by a single vendor located in Eastern Europe or elsewhere.
Establish an Effective QA Process
An effective QA process is built to allow maximum coverage as far as the importance of software testing, and quality assurance is concerned. To do so, you need to check the product requirements against both functional and non-functional requirements.
Functional requirements are project-specific and are established in the form of use cases and user stories: it tells QA specialists what a specific feature must do.
Non-functional requirements are a set of guidelines and define how the system should perform certain functions. For more details, please refer to our article on functional and non-functional requirements.
You can always do better about QA, but you wouldn’t know how unless you are aware of how to measure the quality of software testing. We advise using quantitative and quality KPIs, among other software testing metrics, to determine where you might fall short. Both these approaches will give a bird-eye view of your QA team’s performance.
Additionally, you might want to know what kind of tools you want to bring in your QA process. JIRA is pretty much a standard to-go tool nowadays. A good thing about it is that it has various extensions like Xray or TestFLO that can be extremely useful for QA management.
Automate to Streamline the Process
Some tests can be run repeatedly – so why not automate them and put your human resources to effective use? A good starting point is defining which tests need to be automated first. If you need to work on a project that involves massive data sets, test automation can be the solution you need.
When it comes to selecting a platform for automated testing, things get a little bit more complicated. Here is a couple of things worth considering:
- What operating systems (OS) are you going to test? How about your tech stack – is it .Net, C#, or something else entirely?
- Does your testing involve mobile devices? If yes, Android, iOS, or both?
- Are your QA engineers capable of running scripts themselves?
- Would UI design be a concern for you? Would your automated tests be affected by the design changes?
And a bunch of other things like that. Depending on your answer, your platform of choice can be Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Selenium, or even Zephyr. It might seem like you’ve got your work cut out for you in pursuing the QA automation prospect. So why not trust our UTOR experts to take care of it? Our QA engineers are experts in both manual and automated testing while being DevOps adepts at the same time.
Bottom Line
All in all, improving your QA process is a matter of using proper planning, DevOps practices, and experienced QA specialists that can blend in with your existing software development team. Following the above-mentioned tips will help you get yourself all set for further improvements.
