This blog is written with an objective to make test aspirants, professionals, and other keen students, aware about the practices which are essential for implementing effective testing and quality assurance. The points which we are going to discuss here, gathered through the real experience of software testing and QA efforts. These points will surely help young test engineers to refine their knowledge about test implementation and QA practices.
1. Process :
It is essential for an organization to prepare and defines a strong process that is certified by software industry experts in order to start software quality assurance. The process can be treated as guidelines which needs to be developed over time. It can be used as official standards and should be followed throughout the SDLC and STLC process until the establishment of complete process.
2. Managerial Commitment :
Managerial commitment is necessary behind the success of test and quality of project. For this, it is required to align all the development managers and test managers engaged in a project. Here, every one must have knowledge about the necessity of testing and QA activities for business.
3. Personal Experience :
A good practical experience is beneficial for a project to eliminate the probability of error occurence in a project. Therefore, it will be a best practice to hire a resource that have good understanding and experience of handling issues efficiently.
4. Deliverables :
In software development and software testing process, all the deliverables, like requirements, test cases, test design, test plan needs to be defined properly. This will assure that test professionals can effectively understand the project and implement best techniques for ensuring quality of software.
5. Tool Usage :
To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of implemented test, software tools needs to be employed. The tools save testing time and cost for identifying testing defects, designing and creating test cases, and test cases execution. The test team should be aware of using automation tools for testing an application with great outputs.
6. Metrics :
It is a good practice to develop and create test metrics for measuring the quality attributes in application. With the help of metrics the current version of software project is compared with previous version of software for its quality and performance. This will help testers and developers to identify the issues or errors and make changes in software accordingly.
7. Testing Environment :
It is necessary to implement an appropriate testing environment so that actual defects of application can be identified. Test environment that will efficiently supports the software needs to be developed by the developer's team and the designed tests should be executed to identify the defects and actual behaviour of application.
8. Test Data :
After developing a test environment, there will be a requirement of test data to execute day-to-day operations. This will help testers to identify the performance and other issues associated with application. So, here it means that not only the test environment is necessary but also test data is also essential for execution of test cases.
9. Change Management :
Just like the real production environment, testing environment needs to be traced for changing configurations. It will help in ensuring controlled results and take appropriate actions according to the changing requirement configurations.
10. Developer Awareness :
It will be a helpful practice for developers to have awareness about all the business goals, processes, and change management. This practice will be beneficial for implementing an effective techniques for testing and quality assurance on software project.
The above mentioned are some of the important practices which according to testing experts needs to be considered while going to perform testing or quality assurance for a software project. These practices will increase efficiency and productivity of a successful test.
