Table of Contents

• 1. Planning Testing Requirements
• 2. Planning Test Cases
  • Smoke or Build Verification Test
  • Field Validation Test
  • Mistake Proofing Test
  • Performance Testing
• 3. Fixing Defects

In today’s highly competitive world, businesses do not get much time to test a product before releasing it into the market. With the competitor’s product out in the market, you have to quick-fire your production to provide an innovative set of features or updates.

Studies reveal that most of the companies spend ½ of the project budget on testing. To leverage resources and stay ahead in the competition, companies should develop a proper QA strategy that prioritizes testing requirements.

In general, the following are the three important things that project or businesses should follow from ‘Testing or QA’ perspective. In fact, these three items are already the fundamental ‘testing’ related tasks generally done in any project :

• Planning Testing Requirements
• Planning Test Cases
• Planning Defect Fixing

1. Planning Testing Requirements

Consider an instance wherein you are planning to publish a software release. You have to create a sprint or iteration. While doing so, you have to choose priority levels for each requirement. While a requirement might be critical, there are some features that are desired but not critical. So, take time to mark the priority levels of each requirement.

The idea here is to emphatically work on critical issues in the development phase and spend less time on low-priority requirements. Else, developers might spend more time on the first requirement and then run out of time when working on critical issues.

• P1 – Vital requirement (the product cannot be released without developing these features)
• P2 – Desired but not a compulsory requirement
• P3 – Trivial requirement (Can be added if time permits)

When you plan your development requirements, it is important to provide your requirements plan to developers so that they can put more effort on prioritized items.

2. Planning Test Cases

The second important aspect is to test each requirement of your itinerary or sprint. Each module should be error-free and produce desired results. Test cases are to be prioritized as well based on how well they eliminate bugs and add value to the product. Here is the best order to do so :

Smoke or Build Verification Test

First of all, perform a smoke test to check the basic functionality of the module or code. For instance, you have to create a registration page for a website. The page should allow users to enter details and then store the details of the users in its database. As a first step, you can run a smoke test that checks if all fields contain valid data.

Field Validation Test

The next thing is to perform the field validation test. This test case checks if the code requires all fields to be filled with valid data and not a single field can be left empty. At the same time, the field width is checked as well. If there is a limit of 100 characters for a name field, the user should not be able to enter more than that. Thirdly, this test case should check if the field contains values that fall inside a specific range.

Mistake Proofing Test

Negative tests allow you to check if the web page rejects negative entries and warns the user to correct the entry. For instance, the user tries to register his account. The minimum age limit of the registration is 13 years. So, the date of birth should not allow the user to register if his age falls below 13 years.

Performance Testing

If the code passes basic steps, you can go ahead and dig it deeper. By subjecting the page to extreme traffic loads, you can do performance testing and ensure that the site always works fine.

3. Fixing Defects

The third aspect to prioritize is defect planning. When you run a test case, there are several defects that creep up. While some of them do not affect the functionality of the system, there are certain bugs that crash the system and needs immediate attention.

To manage service levels and publish the release on time, it is important that your developers spend more time on fixing critical defects.

So, the best thing to do is to check the severity of the defect and prioritize them accordingly. You may call it a ‘risk-based defect triaging‘.With a properly designed software QA strategy, businesses can ensure that testing resources are leveraged to produce effective results.

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The recent cloud computing revolution has raised the technology bar to a higher standard. While the incorporation of cutting edge technologies into business processes has improved the efficiency of software products, shrinking IT budgets have resulted in optimized software development strategies.

The new innovation in the software development segment is DevOps. This innovative software development methodology integrates the development teams with operations. This approach envisages the performance of the end product at the developing stage to minimize bugs and bring agility to the development cycle. However, agile software development poses certain challenges to the testing guys.

In a traditional software development segment, organizations either follow a waterfall method or an incremental method.

In this traditional software development setup, the product passes the development stage and reaches the testing phase as the last stage. After extensive testing is done, errors are documented and the product is again sent to the developers for editing purposes. With this approach, testers get the flexibility to enjoy ample time in testing the product. In addition, the entire product is designed and the testing team has a clear vision of the performance of the product. So, the testing procedures are effectively performed.

When it comes to agile software development, the project is broken into smaller units. At the same time, developers team up with operations and testing teams to bring agility to the project.

Challenges for An Agile Tester

As the development is done in smaller increments, modules are delivered in, frequent intervals. This poses a substantial challenge for testers coming from a traditional SDLC model since the time to perform testing in each cycle is short, hence testers have to generally work under strict deadlines.

Secondly, adequate specifications are not available, unlike the traditional development setup where testers get the full project report and enjoy the luxury of conducting tests.

Agile testing environment requires you to proactively work on tasks and show greater levels of adaptability to situations. Testers have to intuitively work on smaller test modules and still perform at a higher level.

In addition, the agile development environment draws a thin line between the roles such as developer, admin, tester etc. While the development team creates their own testing code and implements it to measure the performance of the application, testers also have to provide suggestions on how the product can be effectively developed.

In other words, the testing team needs to visualize the performance of the product at the end-user level and incorporate ideas for the effective development of the product, let alone the test planning or execution

Well not all is too challenging in ‘agile world’, there are advantages too. As the testing team closely works with developers, they have an idea of actual requirements, system implementation and development progress.

This makes testing procedures more efficient and reliable. The integration of testing practices into the development improves the efficiency of the product before it leaves the development segment. Another notable benefit of agile software testing is its concept of a whole team. Gone are the days when each department in a software development project works individually.

Today, all domains related to software development are integrated in such a way that every member of the organization has something to offer in the product development phase. This is how a great team spirit is built and maintained. By integrating various segments together, employees are motivated, team spirit is uplifted and the attrition rate is considerably reduced.

Growing business demands pose great challenges for every segment and the testing industry is not excluded. Today, testers need to develop communication skills and leadership skills along with functional aspects to add value to the business. Being adept to these changing trends is the need of the hour.

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With an increased need for an agile and optimized project development system, programmers have a tough time dealing with the code and making it error-free.

Unit testing is a nice option for programmers to create applications with minimal errors. Be it unit testing or integrating testing, businesses need to ensure that an application offers nice and useful features and at the same be error-free.

What Is Unit Testing?

Unit testing is one of the testing methods wherein developers break coding scripts into the smallest units to quickly and easily check the functionality of single function or class. Implementation of unit testing is normally done at the development cycle of the application by the developer before passing it on to the testing team. Basically unit testing lets you know if individual functions or procedures deliver the desired output.

Benefits of Unit Testing

Common Issues With Unit Testing

While unit tests incorporate agility into development projects, there are certain issues as well.

However, programmers tend to write long scripts to check how the application contacts and retrieves data from a database or a file system. When there are moving parts in the system, you have to stick to true unit tests. If the unit test does not separate your logic from the OS and other features, it does not serve the purpose.

Unit Testing Vs Integration Testing

Unit tests drive your design. By testing each piece of the module, you can effectively develop the system. Moreover, they guarantee that each function performs accordingly. They are easy to maintain and you can even document workflow as well.

On the other hand, integration tests are useful when you have to test the entire application or the system as an additional layer to regression testing. You test the code with real databases and resources. In short, you use one single large test code to test multiple objects of a system. Another important area wherein integration tests are highly effective is when testing legacy code. As legacy code does not contain proper tests, it is not easy to test it. By using any legacy code testing tool like Typemock, you can run integration tests on the legacy code to ensure that components are properly integrated.

To effectively run tests and trust the outcome, you should distinguish and separate integration tests and unit tests for a quality development project.

Conclusion:

While the same principle cannot be applied to all projects, the basic principle of testing is as the above testing pyramid. As seen in the pyramid, unit tests form the base of the project development and take up a larger portion of tests. Integration tests are one step above unit testing wherein the entire system is checked with real-time resources followed by acceptance testing.

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In today’s highly competitive world, there is little scope for errors. To stay ahead of the competition, companies need to maintain higher quality standards while developing software products and the QA team has a greater role to play. There are several best software testing practices that can improve the quality of a product and Regression testing is an important one among them.

By performing regression testing, companies can create products that cater to the needs of customers while eliminating technical glitches in the functionality of the product.

What is Regression Testing?

Regression Testing is an important testing practice that makes sure that the product is free of errors after code is altered or when new features are added. This is particularly important when the beta version of a product is released and certain changes are incorporated into the product, based on the feedback. In addition, the lifespan of software products is limited and they forego changes frequently. For every release of newer versions, companies have to make sure that the functionality is intact. Regression testing can be performed using older test cases, partial or full.

Choosing the functionalities for regression testing is not easy. It requires lot of expertise and experience. You need to consider several aspects like the coding that is recently changed, frequently used functionalities, main features etc. If you test the full suite it requires huge expenses and time as well.

Another option is to choose the functionality area where changes are incorporated. Whether you choose obsolete test cases or reusable test cases, partial regression testing saves huge operational expenses and time. Alternately, you can choose to test frequently used functionalities to be on the safer side.

Software tools for Regression Testing

While choosing the right software for regression testing, you need to consider the business functionality. If changes are made frequently to your product, regression testing adds up to your testing expenses. You have to perform test cases over and over again. Using manual testing is a cumbersome process as you have to spend more resources and time as well.

Automated testing is a good idea for regression testing. Every time a new update is made, you can use an automated script to check the functionality. Most importantly, automated scripts can be run unattended. Quick Testing Professional from HP is a great tool that efficiently handles regression and functionality testing. This object-based tool allows you to create scripts based on keywords. QTP uses VB scripts and Excel for programming and data-driven testing to boost the quality of testing procedures.

Regression Testing in Agile software development

Agile software development is the new trend in the development segment. Agile development requires companies to incorporate innovation into business processes while automating most tasks. Regression Testing is an ideal choice when it comes to agile software development. While people complain that regression testing finds more defects to demoralize the developing team, this is a striking advantage too.

By finding out defects, automated regression testing boosts greater levels of confidence to the development team. Moreover, it puts a greater level of responsibility on developers as they have to work in coordination with the testing team. When you look at the whole team concept, this is a huge benefit for any organization.

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