Testing is the basic activity in product development which aimed at detecting and solving technical issues in the software source code and assessing the overall product usability, performance, security, and compatibility as an end product. It isn’t only the main part of quality assurance; it is also an integral part of the software development process.
In this tutorial we’ll discuss the fundamentals of achieving maximum quality in your testing life-cycle.
In generalized terms, Quality is very hard to define but can simplified as "Something extra ordinary with easy to use" It is all about meeting the needs and expectations of customers. Testing in product development life cycle is not an easy job when you asked for the quality with best user experience. It Is challenging because you have to keep yourself updated with the latest knowledge as well continuously provide more qualitative inputs to make a product better.
To provide quality in under development product, is jointly efforts of whole product team including testing team as well as developers. A tip to developers is Perform peer review in frequent phases. Looking at the source code can uncover a lot of problems. Perform this step before you hand the code over for testing. Execute unit testing before delivering the module to testing team.
If your basic functionality testing detects something that doesn't work, don’t bother. You can fix it later, just don't leave any surprises in your application for testers. In a continuous integration environment, unit tests should run every time you commit a change to the source code repository, and you should run them on your development environment. .
For any reason if you can't fix them immediately, let the team know what has failed, so it won't come as a surprise when tester come across the same problem. When your application has something with new features, it is highly recommended that regression testing should be executed to check whether the new change has affected any existing features or not.
Automation testing plays an extensive role here to minimize the testing team’s effort when a build with new feature comes for testing. Tester should have regression suit to run on the build with new change or feature is introduced to make sure that all the major functions are working properly. It also makes basic testing quick and efficient.
Some of the fundamental in product development we can follow to have smoother journey towards the quality:
1. Functional understanding of product
When developing any product, thoroughly understand the requirement and identify the entire if’s and but’s with respect to the requirement. Product requirements help to turn the vision of a product into reality by outlining what we’re going to build.
2. Unit Testing
Unit testing minimize the defect count. It is one of the practices from development team to understand and test your code at development end first before delivering it to testing team. From the developers prospective, Review the code, go through the modules you have built. Execute your unit test scenarios, if it gets pass in your execution then only release the build to testing team for extensive testing.
3. Effective Testcases
Test cases clarify what needs to be done to test any product. It gives the steps which we execute, the input data values which we enter in the system along with the expected results when we execute a particular test case. An must not have redundant testcases, must cover every corner of the application and must include every possible combinations of test data.
4. Maximize test coverage
Test coverage measures the amount of testing performed by a set of test cases. When we count the volume of application has been tested against some amount of testcases, then we can measure coverage and is known as test coverage. Try to maximize this coverage in your application and try to cover each and every point with possible test data.
5. Paying attention to performance testing
Performance testing can demonstrate how your application performing. It can measure what parts of the system or workload cause the system to perform badly. The testing conducted to evaluate the compliance of a system or software component with specified performance requirements, such as response times, transaction rates and resource utilization.”
6. Think out of box
Out-of-the-box or being creative is about solving a problem differently. Whenever you are in middle of testing and going through the application, think about the reasonable alternatives. You must have
alternatives to look any particular feature. Try and implements your alternatives, you will definatly make a step upwards.
7. Trust on exploratory and monkey testing
Before getting into the process for testing, just explore your application. The benefited you will get is, you will understand your application more and you may find some random defects. Once you’ll be in process and executed all your testcases, just spend some time to execute monkey testing in your application. Most of the time, you may miss some of the scenario in your testcases which you can find in monkey testing by browsing random feature with all the different level scenarios.
8. User tracking matrices
In testing life cycle you must have tracking matrices to tracked your testing efforts, which will also tell you the progress and show where you stand in the particular phase.
Conclusion:
In Software testing we can’t test all the combinations of inputs to the program. We can’t test for all of the other potential failures, such as those caused by user interface design errors or incomplete requirements analyses but if we follow and maintain an effective plan, we can at least ensure the quality in the product. Testing is the backbone of the SDLC lifecycle. Any software application can be put into use only after that product has achieved the bug free stage or fully tested level. Ultimately testing is a never ending process and we can never assume that 100 % test cases have been prepared, we can only minimize the risk of having bad experience to end user or customer with the application.
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