- Participation right from beginning: Having QA people in early stage of discussion is a good practice of any software development life cycle.Once they are in from initial it helps get a better understanding about application and also to cover corner cases to avoid bugs afterward as well as to point basic flaws. Doing a preparation of test environment at early stage is a kind of prevention for any sort of delays and unknown risks, that way team will have enough time to deal with. If it is not possible to be a part in these stages then ask you lead or manager to involve the tester in decision making meetings.
- Store intelligently: Having a sequenced, centralized and organised requirements & change request is better practice. It helps to avoid scattering documents over email, file server or intranet. Silently it helps to increase the productivity & improves availability of documents at any point.
- Start writing testing cases early in the requirement analysis & design phase: If you start writing test cases during early phase of Software Development Life Cycle then you will understand whether all requirement are testable or not. While writing test cases first consider Valid/Positive test cases which cover all expected behavior of application under test. After that you can consider invalid conditions/negative test cases.
- Test early, test often: It has been observed that most of the errors are identified in the testing phase which is already introduced in the requirement or design phase. Defects identified later in SDLC are expensive to fix than defects identified in early stage. So testing should start early to avoid the introduction of defects in the early phase.
- Use good metrics: Metrics are important for more than one reason software testing projects. Testing your software is one thing and choosing the right metrics is another. Measuring quality and making the right decisions another. Metrics are used to get the efficiency and productivity provigil online with no prescription over time. Quality Objectives Must Be measurable, documented, reviewed and tracked. Choose metrics which are simple to execute & effective in nature. Make sure that choose metrics such that which will present the big picture like:
| Testing Metrics | Data Received |
| No of Story | 10 |
| Total no. TC written | 30 |
| Total No of TC executed | 28 |
| No. of TC passed | 23 |
| No. of TC failed | 02 |
| No. of TC Blocked | 02 |
| No of TC not executed | 01 |
| No. of Defects raised | 12 |
| No of Critical Defects | 03 |
| No. of Medium Defects | 12 |
| No of iterations happened | 03 |
- Writing good, clear & descriptive bug report: Some time we found that the test cases which is written or bugs reported is not so clear which takes multiple iteration to understand which is nothing but loss of time for both QA and dev team. If we will follow certain steps or create a template of writing bugs or test cases will help to make your software testing more efficient. While writing we should always keep in mind that the person who is going to review this is not having detail awareness about this issues and challenging & creative job. It is your skill how you are handling this challenging situations. Your efforts towards writing good bug report will not only save company resources but also create a good relationship between you and developers.
- Test environments should own by Testing team: When comes to provide a good experience to user we should setup a exact replica of production environment to test and that should be owned by QA team. Why they need this ? Sometimes developers add some configurations or run script but missed to add in release document or configuration file. And if QA is having same local or staging this can be passed by QA because some issues can not be verified or reproduced. So as a result there is huge chance of getting build fail in production.
