Businesses are increasingly under pressure to provide quick turnarounds. Advances in the software development industry have made it possible for developers and quality assurance teams to stay ahead of emerging trends. Adopting agile development enhances the product value, increases flexibility, mitigates against ballooning project costs, and identified risks.
Traditionally, software houses would neglect quality assurance in favor of live testing with customers. However, clients are demanding services that deliver value without impacting their business processes. Test case management ensures quality assurance is an integral part of the development process. It is an excellent strategy to meet the evolving needs of customers continuously.
Benefits of managing the test process
Why is it important to be in control of your testing procedures? Coupled with automated strategies, managing your testing delivers numerous advantages to both the software house and the client.
- Test management improves your time-to-market and ensures a robust product. It provides an opportunity to review the customer requirements against the developer’s capacity early on in the process.
- It provides a single easy-to-use cutting-edge platform where you can organize all the testing activities. This gives a clear picture of the test process and makes it easy to capture the overall progress.
- Quality assurance teams can create multiple versions of test cases. These can be iterated to save time that can be used to improve the quality of the product. It also enables sharing of test cases across projects and releases. This builds consistency into the testing process and the results.
- It aligns testing with development. This reduces the proliferation of bugs and ensures the process focuses on delivering expected results.
- Automated testing and quality assurance provide an opportunity to detect both human errors and technology challenges. You can then create a strategy to minimize the effect on the end product.
- Automated testing enables real-time test metrics. This enables analysis and interpretation as well as traceability through the process. Consequently, you can predict your product releases more accurately. Test results can be shared and evaluated by the various stakeholders such as vendors and system users.
You can achieve high-quality results by leveraging agile testing processes. Agile development puts unique pressures on the testing process.
How to streamline automated testing for maximum results
Take time to educate the stakeholders on the capacities of the testing platforms. This includes developers, quality assurance teams, marketing, as well as customers. This aligns expectations and helps focus on the strengths.
Selecting the right tools is critical to the success of the testing process. This should cover the user interface, APIs, and data processing functionality.
Inspire developers to create smart code. This includes uniquely identifiable elements, understandable naming schemes, and using the appropriate controls. Strive to implement automated tests on mature code. Agile development by design requires input and change requests early in the process. You can schedule to write the test code in between iterations when the features under test are relatively mature and stable.
Adopt a modular strategy to product development. This scales down to modular features and code. This enables you to organize the testing process based on the individual functions of each module. This ensures that changes to individual modules do no impact the overall workflow. In like manner, separate the development of the integral modules including data handling, logging, and user interfaces.
Conclusion
Taking control of your testing processes enables you to deliver superior products that provide value in a highly competitive market. Reports show that companies are warming up to automated testing processes. Some of the popular automated testing tools include qTest from QASymphony, TestLink, and TestRail from Gurock Software among numerous others. Integrating the control of testing into the development lifecycle creates efficiencies that improve the value of the end product.