Best Practices for Software Testing
As software and websites become an integral part of business processes, ensuring their effectiveness through thorough testing & evaluation after development is even more important than before.
Also, the complexity of modern software/software applications and the need to use them on different platforms and devices have made software testing important.
Complete testing is essential for quality assurance, and best practices in software testing can produce high-quality software in the end.
Here are some of the best practices to ensure your QA process does its job.
- Process: It is important for an organization/company to define a robust and professionally certified process in order to implement a culture of software validation. The process will serve as a guide that can change over time. Most importantly, it should be legalized and should be followed. Progress will be made until a mature process is established.
- Write Tests for Maximum Coverage: Write all kinds of tests to cover the maximum number of cases, if 100 percent is impossible. By writing test cases for valid conditions and unforeseen circumstances/performance of applications under test, you can achieve advanced testing and cover maximum tests.
- Developers Should Not Write Tests: All test cases should be written before coding. Coders/programmers should not write test codes in their code to reduce the chances of bias testing or incompetence in the test. Test cases should be written by the QA team as they can write them according to requirements and the cases will not be biased.
- Break Tests in Small Fractions: If you take the tests often and throughout the cycle, taking small tests will save you time and resources. Many tests are longer than we think, so divide large tests into smaller parts like UI test, performance test, security test, UX test, and so on.
- Noting and Reporting All Tests: When you do manual or automated testing, keeping records of all these tests is a good practice. Note all test progress and observations in a file, and incorporate these observations into the final test reports. Some of the things that should be noted include bug symptoms, results we get across the system, and all possible solutions to make testing more meaningful.
- Testing Environment: Implementation of appropriate testing environments which allow the developers to reproduce the system execution in production environments is important to the creation and execution of the corresponding test cases.
- Customize Testing: Write customized testing solutions for each project according to their needs and use cases. The module in the app running on a smartphone has a different usage case than the tablet environment, so write the test accordingly.
- Use Tools and Metrics: The complex and tedious process of software testing can be simplified by using popular automated testing tools such as. Selenium and other unit testing tools: such as PHPUnit, Amock, PyUnit, Achoo, SQLUnit, etc. These are only a few of the tools that are being used today by the QA teams. Using these tools to automate the process of software testing and Quality Assurance (QA) would increase the maturity of the process
- Multiple Platform Tests: It should come as no surprise that the numbers of platforms and device types vary now more than ever. Multi-platform testing is therefore very important and the only way to ensure compatibility with multi-platform software. Both API functionality and GUI authentication can be tested on different platforms.
- Keep an Eye on the Bigger Picture (aka the User Experience): The first thing all the best testers have in common is their laser focus on user information. It is very easy for testers / QA teams to get lost in the test cases and forget about the end-user, however, this is a big mistake.
Leading testers understand that testing best practices aren’t necessarily things to check off a list, but rather a step to be taken to help bring the best end product to users.
We have explored the best practices to enhance the testing projects for better quality and security of your software in the current age. Experienced and expert software testing developers are mandatory to hit your testing goals.
