SOFTWARE QA AND TESTING
Quality assurance (QA) testing is the process of ensuring that your product is of the highest possible quality for your customers. QA is simply the techniques used to prevent issues with your software product or service and to ensure great user experience for your customers. But what are the QA best practices?
Your quality assurance (QA) testing methodology should ideally combine both automated testing and manual testing. The key is to determine which type of test is most relevant for each aspect and stage of the product.
Manual testing allows you to cover a wide range of conditions and scenarios. The feedback of the QA testers regarding the experience and feel of the app will prove invaluable. Manual tests are preferable for exploratory testing, usability testing and ad hoc testing. Ideally, manual tests should be performed by highly skilled and experienced testers who represent different end user profiles and use a wide range of devices and operating systems.
To save time whilst testing, manual testing can be supplemented with frequent automated tests. Automation is the most appropriate solution when performing white box testing, load tests and other performance testing.
Any test that needs to be performed repeatedly should be automated. Automated tests are practical and reliable and will help you to make sure the app performs adequately from a technical standpoint.
Automation won’t be a good fit for all your testing needs. You can supplement the manual testing performed in-house with crowd testing. With this approach, your product can be tested on a much larger scale in a time-efficient manner.
Adopting a methodology that incorporates testing into a series of short development cycles is another best QA practice worth considering.
Agile methodologies make sense in the context of developing mobile apps, given that these products typically have short development cycles and mobile users have extremely high expectations regarding functionality, quality and frequent updates.
With agile methodologies, QA testing is part of the design and development processes, rather than being a separate phase. Test results are directly incorporated into the design and development processes, and quality becomes a guiding principle.
This is a collaborative approach that requires designers, developers, the QA team, and sometimes even users to communicate or work together. In order to facilitate collaboration, you can use a single repository for the app code.
Your teams will go through a short design or development cycle, followed by a targeted quality control and testing phase for the new feature that was just added. Additional regression testing, security testing, and stress testing can be undertaken as needed. The outcome of this phase will determine what happens during the next design or development cycle.
Leveraging automation will keep things moving once you adopt this approach. Test automation speeds up the targeted testing phases and helps you to move onto the next development cycle in a matter of hours or days. You will need to schedule manual tests after some key design or development cycles to incorporate feedback regarding the user experience and other key aspects of the app.
You will need to create a framework for reviewing and using the data generated during the short testing phases. It’s not enough to simply undergo functional testing - you need to incorporate feedback into the design and development process as early as possible.
Should developers write tests? On one hand, the agile approach is about ownership. Involving developers in the test case writing process will make QA one of their responsibilities.
On the other hand, developers who create tests might become biased and write code that will pass the test without meeting other quality standards, or unconsciously create a test with limited coverage.
For this reason, some teams create a test plan but then rely on outsourcing the process, or handing it over to dedicated QA engineers.
Even though each test case should have a narrow focus, there should be cohesion in your test case suite. Your test case suite should have a scope that is adapted to the scale of your project.
Customise and execute test cases in an environment that is different to the one used for development. Each test should be based on clear expectations and result in a measurable outcome.
Break down each test case into a series of concise steps. Taking these steps will tell you whether or not a feature works. You can think of writing a test case as a series of actions associated with a question. When an action is taken, the automated test or human testers should answer a simple question to measure the success of the action.
The instructions written for each test case should give testers a clear understanding of what they are expected to do. You can save time and get better results by providing test cases, instructions, and tutorials that aren’t liable to misinterpretation. There are testing tools available to make this even easier.
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are strategies used in software development that complement the agile methodology. You can incorporate a continuous testing strategy to CI and CD.
Without CI and CD, developers split up their work and assemble different segments of the code late in the development cycle. This can result in a lack of cohesion, compatibility, and issues with how the different segments of the code interact.
With continuous integration, the code is kept in a central repository. Developers work on making small changes to the code and upload small sections of code to the central repository regularly. You can incorporate quality management into this methodology by having a series of tests performed every time the code is updated. The new segments need to be tested, but you should also conduct regression testing to see how changes affect the main features of the product.
Continuous delivery allows you to release new iterations of your product on a regular basis. This is a quick and efficient approach to addressing bugs and issues that affect the user experience.
The key is to incorporate user feedback into your CI and CD processes so that issues can be quickly addressed and a new and improved version of your product can be released.
Again, you will have to incorporate testing in your process, for instance by having crowd testers perform usability tests before a new major version of your product is made available to users.
The right QA testing methodology will provide the information needed by your design and development teams to produce a quality app. Remember that software quality doesn't depend on testing but on the outcome of your QA tests and how you use this data.
Your approach to QA testing needs to be adapted to the product you are developing.
