Software testing practices in a nutshell:
- Formulate a structured testing plan and strategy to enhance transparency and efficiency in testing, optimizing resource allocation and elevating software quality
- Integrate testing seamlessly into the development phase, especially within Agile or DevOps frameworks. This approach facilitates quicker issue resolution, fosters collaboration, and elevates software quality
- Employ test-driven development approaches, encompassing diverse testing methods, automated testing, and comprehensive test cases. These practices result in the creation of dependable, sustainable, and top-quality software applications
If you cannot guarantee the quality, reliability, and performance of your software application, all your investments in terms of effort, finances, and time may go to waste. This could lead to issues such as bad user experiences, revenue loss, harm to your brand reputation, security breaches and escalated expenses.
Hence, it becomes crucial to understand how to secure the quality of your software application. The solution lies in adhering to established software testing best practices.
Software Testing Best Practices
Software Test Plan vs Test Strategy
This is where you start with your software testing efforts. Firstly, you need a test plan and also a matching test strategy to make sure your development project will work properly. These two terms are often used as synonyms. To avoid confusion, let’s take a look at what they each really mean.
Software Test Plan
💡 The main purpose of a test plan is to provide documentation that describes how the QA tester will prove that the system is working as designed.
A good test plan is defined as a document that outlines the scope, objective, method, and weight of a software testing task. It basically confirms all functional and design requirements.
Having such a plan will make it easier for you to develop an appropriate, quantifiable and transparent testing process. This will allow you to keep up with the progress of your software testing and evaluate the effectiveness of your testing efforts. In order to create a detailed test plan, take a look at the following points:
Scope Definition for Testing
Outline the testing scope, covering features, functionalities, and constraints.
Testing Process Objectives
Clearly state testing objectives, such as functionality validation, security, performance, and usability benchmarks.
Types of Software Testing
Specify the software testing types (chapter covering DevOps and Agile software testing) to be employed on your application.
Testing Schedule
Create a testing schedule with milestones, deadlines, and application dependencies.
Testing Environment Details
Include hardware, software, network configuration, and resource information for testing.
Progress Evaluation Parameters
Define metrics for tracking testing progress and enhancing performance throughout the testing lifecycle.
Software Test Strategy
💡The primary aim of a Test Strategy is to provide a comprehensive view of the approach, tools, objectives, and timing for test activities. It should elucidate the fundamental tasks and challenges within the test project.
The test strategy outlines risk mitigation, criteria, and required testing types, informing project leaders, developers, and QA experts about critical process issues.
|💡Key Differences between Software Developers – Junior/Middle/Senior & Lead
Embedding Testing into the Development Process
Integrating testing into the development phase is key, especially if you use agile or DevOps methodologies in your software development. Testing during the development process allows you to find problems or bugs as soon as they occur.
For this purpose, close cooperation with developers and software testers is highly recommended. Through joint responsibility and communication, the quality of the software can be significantly increased.
Benefits at a glance:
- Detect errors earlier
- Receive feedback faster
- Shorten time to market
- Improve code quality
- Use resources efficiently
Establish Test-Oriented Development Methods
If the focus is on creating software products that are maintainable, reliable and overall good quality it is beneficial to implement testing right into the development methods.
Here are two development methods that could help you:
Test-Driven Development (TDD)
TDD involves developers crafting concise test cases for each feature based on their initial comprehension. The key objective is to make code modifications or write new code exclusively when tests indicate failure, thus avoiding redundant test scripts.
Behavioral-Driven Development (BDD)
BDD primarily centers on system behavior, offering various approaches for developing features based on that behavior. Typically, it employs the Given-When-Then structure for test case composition.
Here’s a great article on the topic
|💡Key Differences between Software Developers – Junior/Middle/Senior & Lead
Two Key Software Development Methodologies
DevOps as a Test Strategy
When you put “development” and “operations” together you come up with DevOps. As a methodology, DevOps aims to foster collaboration between these typically separate teams across the entire software development process, resulting in improved efficiency, accelerated software development, and increased product quality.
Continuous Testing with DevOps
Continuous Testing runs automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to provide immediate feedback on execution results and business risks associated with a software release candidate. It is a way to release your software quickly and reliably. This involves testing your software as often as possible from the beginning of development to release.
Agile Software Testing
Agile represents a set of guiding beliefs that developers can integrate into their software development decisions. While it doesn’t prescribe a specific methodology, Agile principles have influenced the standardization of development methods and have given rise to related frameworks such as Lean and Scrum.
↪️These principles encompass dividing projects into manageable stages, emphasizing incremental development and software delivery, working within short time frames or iterations, and fostering continuous client interaction and feedback.
Summary
Software Testing is not only about having the right talent, but also about having the right strategy and tools to choose from. In this blog article, we have provided a quick insight into software testing best practices.
In the next article, we will look at current trends and those that could become even more important in 2024.
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Thanks for reading,
Team codecominator