Tried and true ways to quickly pinpoint problem areas within your QA process

Lauren Gilmore , Dog owner, expat, gin lover. Allegedly wise to the ways of digital marketing, PR, and social media. Currently waging a war on mediocrity in communication and storytelling.

April 30th, 2019

The Quality Assurance bottleneck is fixed, but that doesn’t mean it’s smooth sailing.

Agile development has helped speed up the process of QA testing and development. While that’s great, that doesn’t necessarily mean your QA teams are as effective as they could be. Problems still persist, even in an agile environment.

Software development has sped up. New features are released on a continuous schedule, so QA teams have had to adapt as well. Sprints are shorter. Testing is nearly just-in-time. When developing a QA test strategy it’s important to identify speed bumps that can potentially slow down the process and create new bottlenecks.

Developer unit testing

Unit testing is typically done by developers because it involves scripts. But developers typically aren’t interested in doing them. It takes time away from moving on to the next feature build, so it usually gets a low-priority. Plus, because developers just wrote the feature, they assume that everything is perfect.

By bringing in the QA team to run tests earlier, the cycle of testing itself begins earlier. As developers write code, they also write unit tests, allowing you to ensure new changes aren’t broken. This helps speed up the entire testing process and makes final tests much quicker by allowing developers to focus on the task at hand instead of delaying the inevitable.

This leads to tremendous benefits in the long run and allows your developers to work on what they really want  – developing features.

Teamwork makes the dream work

Getting developers and QA testing teams working together early is the key to eliminating most bottlenecks in modern development. As it stands, developers have a somewhat apathetic view to testing and would rather just get it over with. That leads them to pass on poorly documented or undocumented changes to the QA testing team, causing testers to take extra time to figure out what tests to run and puts additional pressure on them to execute their tests while figuring out how the system works.

If your QA team is asking a lot of basic questions that should have been handed over from the development team, you should look to get developer buy-in for tests and bring in a QA engineer to work directly with development.

Feature releases that are low quality

When you build software, it’s important to think of the end user. This is where QA testing teams shine. They have a broad view of what a potential user is likely to do with any particular feature and the experience to recognize what might cause problems in the wild.

To ensure that your features will be of high quality to your users, it’s vital that QA teams are brought in early to the build. They can offer advice to the development teams and therefore increase build quality for end users. This will also have a knock-on effect of speeding up the testing phase later.

Standardized testing tools

QA teams are just like development teams. They like to use the tools that they are most effective with. But that can cause delays when results vary with different tools. If you realize that you are losing testing time by “translating” test results, you may want to look at your team’s toolset and process.

Unrefined Automation Strategy

Automation is the best way to speed up the testing process and has been increasingly used in Agile development. Writing scripts for automation can be intensive work. It’s better to build your test scripts for the future, as well as the present. By breaking up small test cases, you’ll be able to use those same scripts in the future, or, at the very least, it’s more likely that you won’t have to rewrite or toss them out altogether.

With smaller scripts, future changes to the app require less maintenance on your testing. A proper automation test strategy will do wonders for the speed of any testing team.

Conclusions

Quality Assurance testing is an evolving craft, just like development. Each team will have to look at the skills of each team, the tools that they have, and the flow of information between the two to create the perfect environment for faster release schedules. The focus should be on integration and making sure each team is doing what they do best. Look at some of the examples given and see if they might exist in your own teams.

And if you’re ready to take your testing to a whole new level contact us today to schedule a demo.