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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.
- 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.