QA is fast becoming a critical area in all parts of the dev cycle and is quintessential to business success. To make your QA strategy more resilient and efficient in 2023, here are 7 things every organization must do ASAP,
1. Incorporate agile methodologies into software testing
2. Make security testing an integral part of the QA Process
3. Leverage automation
4. Make UX clean, intuitive and robust
5. Shift Left to identify and rectify bugs before the product ships out to customers
6. Make modern QA teams pay attention to load testing
7. Write praise worthy test cases that help testers attain a clear understanding of what they are expected to do
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Modern QA strategies are no longer simply limited to your run-of-the-mill bug hunt and have evolved to become perfectly sculpted to meet organizational goals. QA is fast becoming a critical area in all parts of the dev cycle and the CI/CD pipeline and is quintessential to business success. To make your QA strategy more resilient and efficient in 2023, here are 7 things every organization must do ASAP.
Incorporate Agile Methodologies into Software Testing:
With agile methodologies, QA testing becomes a vital part of the design and development processes, rather than simply being sidelined as a separate phase. Here, quality becomes a guiding principle and test results are directly incorporated into the design and development processes.
This is a collaborative approach that requires the QA team, developers, designers and even end users to communicate and work together. In order to foster better collaboration among all stakeholders, a single repository for the app code must be used.
This will enable teams to go through a shorter development cycle, followed by a targeted quality control and testing phase for the new features. Additionally, regression testing, security testing, and stress testing can be undertaken to ensure everything works as right as rain.
Make Security Testing an Integral Part of your QA Process:
In today’s world, organizations have become possessive about their data and have begun to finally comprehend the ramifications of poorly securing it. This is where modern QA comes in to save the day.
While it’s true that historically QA was a field focused on identifying logical failures in the code written by developers. In today’s world the role of QA has evolved to address security concerns before the application is released into production by leveraging established testing practices.
Integrating security tests with QA can significantly reduce and help streamline software development life-cycle (SDLC) by reducing the probability of failed application releases and shortening application release cycles.
Leveraging Automation for Optimizing the Role of QA teams:
Continuous testing to be effective requires test automation to be implemented throughout the delivery pipeline. Test automation not only hastens the speed of deployment by enabling teams to move onto the next development cycle but, more importantly, reduces the risks inherent in continuous delivery.
Furthermore, to support application delivery at DevOps speed, security tests can be automated and baked into the SDLC so that developers can take remedial actions on security issues before code is committed.
Organizations must also schedule manual tests after key development cycles to incorporate feedback regarding the user experience and other key functionalities of the app.
Make UX clean, intuitive and robust:
A robust testing process is key to creating a user-centric design for an app that is both usable and intuitive enough to meet the requirements of a target audience. Good quality UX is more than a few decorative fonts cobbled together with a vibrant color scheme but rather must include thorough test cases that ensure:
Comprehensibility
Responsive feedback
Predictability
Efficiency
Intuitive design testing can help by checking for scenarios where an app does not receive an expected value from the server in an API response. Similarly, it is prudent to create test cases that put the customer’s needs and desires first and incorporate their feedback into the dev cycle. Adopting a product mindset can greatly help.
Shift Left to prevent disasters before they can take root:
From connectivity failures to functional concerns, bugs are bound to pop up both in expected as well as unexpected places during development. Fixing software bugs is an incredibly costly affair once the product has reached customer hands.
Shifting left and executing smaller QA tests earlier in the allows for more time to identify and rectify bugs effectively, and before the product ships out to customers.
One great way to shift left is by pairing testers with developers to run tests before building the application and providing timely feedback which can be incorporated into the development process. However, keep in mind that tests performed earlier in the pipeline don’t necessarily replace the testing done before deployment – they complement them and reduce the chance of bugs escaping detection.
Make Modern QA teams pay attention to load testing:
Applications can become information-intensive when a massive exchange of data takes place to ensure that the best experience is delivered. Load Testing conducted by QA teams can help draw some much-needed attention to issues that might hinder the application’s performance, or identify any bottleneck that may occur due to excess load on the software behind the application. The recent WhatsApp outage that left users unable to send or receive messages on the platform is a great example of what happens when load testing is skimmed out.
To ensure that QA teams properly conduct load testing without sacrificing quality or test coverage, here’s what they must do:
Requirement Gathering: Determine the mission-critical functionalities of the application that has to be tested and gauge how it will have an impact on the end-user experience.
Map Out User Journeys: Identify how users will interact with the application.
Establish a Baseline: Run tests to establish a solid baseline for your application to test against. Use this benchmark as a safety net to determine if any deviation in the application’s performance warrants a deeper dive into test data.
Automate Away: Have QA teams prioritize load testing as a part of their CI/CD processes & integrate with the tools that are already in use.
These steps will provide a good foundation to begin load testing your application.
Write Praise-Worthy Test Cases:
Should developers write tests?
On one hand, the agile approach is about taking complete ownership of the product being conceived, and enabling developers to write test cases is a great way of instilling a sense of ownership.
On the other hand, this could also mean opening up pandora’s box i.e., developers who create tests tend to develop a bias towards their creation and write code that will pass the test without meeting client requirements or quality standards.
For this reason, even though each test case must have a narrow focus, there should be cohesion in the test case suite. Each test should be based on clear expectations and result in a measurable outcome.
Break down each test case into a series of smaller steps. Taking these steps will tell you whether or not a feature works the way it is intended or not. You can think of writing a test case as a series of actions associated with answering a question. The instructions written for each test case must help testers attain a clear understanding of what they are expected to do. Doing so can enable testers to save time and get better results since they are armed and armored with instructions and tutorials that aren’t liable to misinterpretation.
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