How can one bring the best of outcomes while conducting QA test processes? Simple. It will be advised to have a set of practices and methodologies that you could possibly do with your team and bring the outcomes that will make both the QA team and the clients happy. A few practices that you can follow:
1. Choose your release criteria carefully:
Prioritize your testing efforts. The amount of effort that goes into getting a software developed is gigantic and one fortunate thing is that not all enterprise products need to be tested fully although it is quite impossible to test everything. You can still be confident in the product you approve if you focus on areas of your code where the most significant changes were made.
2. Prioritize bug fixes based on usage:
Bug fixes play the most integral part in the new release process. But do all the bugs need to be looked after at the same time? Not necessarily. We can weigh the importance of each bug fix with respect to the client’s response and the user’s demand. Review the usage data. Using Google Analytics, one can differentiate the most important user interactive data usage and give less priority to the bug fixes in that area. It is not about disregarding the bug fix, it is about giving priorities so as to delegate the efforts and work done in an efficient way.
3. Set testing goals and requirements:
As soon a QA team gets their software testing project, it is very important for them to structure out a plan and set their goals. It is important for the QA engineers to talk to the client and understand their expectations. Understand their users, what are the priority areas they want to concentrate on and other important things. Then, set testing priorities — which ones to look into first and the others that can be worked on later. Communication amongst the team is very important. These are some basic areas to focus on for the QA team which will ensure that the work is done systematically.
4. Share release notes with your clients:
Release Notes is the document prepared by the QA team for clients and containing actual information about the project. What features were completed in the particular sprint, what is still in progress, what are known issues, where and how the demo build can be downloaded. It gives clients additional transparency about development progress.
5. Black-Box testing or white-box testing:
In quality assurance, you can check if the functionality works as planned, which is black box testing; or you can thoroughly review the code of the software which is called white box testing. White box testing tests the internal structures and workings on the program unlike black box testing where the software is treated as a black box examining purely the functionality of the software without any regard to the internal implementation. There is also a grey box testing, which is a mixture of the two kinds of where the testers of the software have knowledge of the internal data structures and design tests based on those algorithms but execute those tests at the user or the black box level.
These simple methodologies and practices might help quality assurance engineers steer the wheel in the right direction!
