Failure to adequately test software can result in severe consequences. Issues resurfacing later in the software’s lifecycle can trigger problems such as subpar user experiences and security breaches, leading to customer loss, financial setbacks, and harm to the brand’s image.

This underscores the significance of software testing in software development—it ensures the software product’s quality, functionality, and dependability. However, if incorrectly executed, software testing can be intricate, time-intensive, and costly. How can you enhance software testing without compromising speed? In this blog, we’ll be going over a few tricks in refining software testing techniques, starting from the planning phase all the way to reporting.

Software Testing As A Continuous Improvement Process

Software testing is an integral part of the software development cycle, running alongside development as an ongoing and continuous process. Initiating testing early in the application lifecycle and integrating it into the development phase itself is critical.

This requires unwavering dedication and consistent communication between the development team and quality assurance. Sometimes, seeking guidance from Offshore Software Development Companies might come in handy to achieve this continuity right from the start and throughout the process.

Implementing best practices, such as the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) approach, proves highly effective in governing and refining the software testing process.

Plan

At this stage, test objectives should be clearly defined, outlining what the testing aims to achieve. By establishing precise testing criteria aligned with software specifications, stakeholders ensure everyone contributes to maximizing software quality.

Do

This phase involves designing and executing tests as outlined in the test plan. A comprehensive test plan simplifies test design, encompassing test procedures, cases, expected results, logs, and more.

Check

The Check phase involves a thorough evaluation of the testing process’s progress. It relies on accurate and timely data, considering workload, types of defects, and schedule status to make informed decisions.

Act

Focusing on addressing any discrepancies between planned and executed work. Analyzing these deviations helps refine test cases, scripts, and overall testing procedures. Based on this analysis, adjustments are made to enhance the testing process and technical aspects.

How-to Improve Software Testing – the Consideration

Goal-Oriented Approach

This entails grasping what requires testing, its reasons, and the methodologies to be employed. Facilitates the creation of a comprehensive plan, emphasizing the testing of critical or high-risk features, potentially minimizing redundant testing activities. The testing endeavors can effectively meet the software’s expectations and intended outcomes by aligning efforts with the objectives.

Agile or waterfall?

Once the software testing plan and objectives are established, the subsequent phase involves selecting the most optimized testing approach. Agile methodology has gained popularity among software testers due to its adaptability and flexibility, making it well-suited for dynamic testing environments. Conversely, specific software testing objectives may lean toward a structured and sequential approach like the waterfall methodology. There isn’t a perfect development methodology to follow but rather a best-fitted approach for your team management model to maximize team resources to achieve predefined goals.

In addition to setting in with the appropriate methodology, this stage involves picking out the most fitting tools. Some may provide broader features and support, including test management, test automation, bug tracking, and performance testing capabilities.

Enhancing Your Testing Strategy

A test plan serves as a comprehensive document outlining the strategy and approach for software testing. It embraces the scope, objectives, methodology, tools, resources, schedule, risks, and deliverables involved in the testing process. In scenarios where time is of the essence, there might be a tendency to rush through or skip creating a test plan altogether. Unfortunately, there aren’t any shortcuts to enhance software testing that does not involve crafting a detailed plan. Developing a thorough test plan helps maintain the thoroughness and uniformity of software testing while facilitating the execution and reporting of the tests.

Moreover, going through the planning process, careful consideration should be given to the test case. These entail a sequence of steps and anticipated outcomes validating specific functionalities or requirements of the software product.

Creating conducive environments as a baseline

An environment that fosters software testing development can significantly influence the testing procedures’ productivity, efficiency, and quality. Key factors contributing to a favorable work setting encompass sufficient equipment and infrastructure, ergonomic and comfortable workspaces, transparent communication channels, a culture of collaboration and support within the team, consistent feedback and acknowledgment, and opportunities for ongoing learning and enhancement.

Improving the work environment may involve various aspects, from establishing distinct roles within the testing team to incorporating enjoyable team-building activities to enhance communication.

Automate testing

Automating tests accelerates the testing process and amplifies its quality. Nevertheless, the adoption of test automation still needs to be improved within organizations due to people’s misconceptions about automation testing.

Test automation employs software tools or scripts to execute repetitive or intricate tests, tasks that would otherwise rely on manual intervention or human judgment. The advantages of test automation in software testing are infinite. These include quicker execution and feedback, heightened accuracy and dependability, reduced cost and effort, more extensive coverage and scalability, and simpler maintenance and reusability. Although implementing test automation can be costly and has limitations, combining automated and manual testing can enhance testing processes, improving both speed and quality.

If you haven’t applied automation testing or are ambiguous “afraid of” automation, you might need to look into it now. The 5.0 era is already here; you’d better catch up or accept being left behind and remain relevant to the constantly evolving tech world.

Following best practices

In a bustling testing environment, there’s often more than once a temptation to skip steps or jump stages to save time suddenly occurs, and we blindly follow through without reconsidering the consequences of those actions. The cost of returning to bug fixes of defects happening in the earlier stage can be mentally and physically draining.

Adhering to best practices can be a bummer at times and sound sketchy as if it’s ethical, and going against it is immoral wrongdoing. However, being judgmental is your worst enemy in the coding development sphere, where we honor transparency and discipline, as dealing with products means we all have deadlines to meet and audiences to please. Practicing best practices means we respect the boundaries that help to lessen errors and bugs to fix, cutting down the extra hours spent in the making.

Optimizing the effectiveness and efficiency of test automation involves implementing and executing the following:

• Apply a consistent naming convention and coding standard across test scripts.
• Organize test scripts into modular, reusable components.
• Employ data-driven or keyword-driven approaches to segregate test data from test logic.
• Utilize descriptive assertions and error-handling mechanisms for result verification and exception management.
• Employ frameworks or libraries to simplify routine or complex tasks.
• Employ version control systems to manage and track changes in test scripts.
• Implement continuous integration tools for automatically running test scripts following code changes.
• Employ reporting tools to generate informative and actionable reports.

Be creative

While crafting a well-structured test plan is the key factor to meeting testing goals, incorporating ad-hoc testing also yields a much higher value during the process, which explores in a creative, unstructured manner to uncover potential defects or unusual scenarios that traditional testing methods might miss.

Adopting exploratory testing can significantly enhance your software testing strategy. It aids in nurturing the intuition, imagination, and experience of software testers.

Embracing shift-left testing or not?

The shift-left testing methodology focuses on conducting tests early on and regularly within the software development lifecycle. This proactive method helps identify defects much sooner, resulting in time and cost reduction for issue resolution. A deeper discussion on shift left testing that we touched upon earlier in the blog sections a few blogs ago; jump ahead to it here if you want all the dirt regarding this approach.

Conducting regular code reviews

Peer code reviews are crucial in identifying defects before the testing phase. Well-structured code reviews can uncover approximately 80% of code defects. Fostering a collaborative atmosphere for code review can improve software quality, keep other coders and testers informed on the best way to code, avoid repeating the same mistakes in other teammates’ work, and keep the workflows transparent and effective.

Leveraging cloud-based testing platforms

Testing in the cloud provides scalability, flexibility, and access to diverse testing environments, resulting in notable reductions in infrastructure expenses and setup duration. Studies predict that the market size for cloud testing will surge from $6.5 billion in 2020 to $11.6 billion by 2025, reflecting an increasing adoption trend.

Generate comprehensive reports

Test reports serve as comprehensive summaries of software testing results and outcomes, covering various aspects like test objectives, scope, methodology, tools, execution, results, analysis, evaluation, conclusions, recommendations, and lessons learned. These reports effectively communicate the software product’s quality and status to the testing team and stakeholders, providing valuable information and insights for future enhancements or decision-making.

Keeping afloat of the most recent testing trends

The world of testing is always changing. Testers must keep up with the newest tools and trends. Here at SHIFT ASIA, we regularly update our blog posts, host webinars, and refresh our training courses to ensure our expertise remains cutting-edge in the realm of software testing.

Improving your software testing

In today’s rapidly evolving software landscape, the role of quality assurance and testing has been in our best interests. As technology progresses, so do the challenges in keeping software reliability, performance, and security in line become more complicated to cope with. This necessitates a proactive approach to testing methodologies, where adaptability and innovation become the cornerstone. Just as how we practice at SHIFT ASIA, we prioritize staying at the forefront of emerging trends and methodologies in the software testing domain by regularly updating our techniques, conducting workshops, and investing in training our team to address the dynamic needs of software testing and guarantee top-notch quality for our client’s products. If you need support getting started with software testing excellence for your business, contact our team for private consultancy.