A test manager’s guide? When you hear the term “software testing,” do you think about one particular type of test — such as functional testing or regression testing — or do you immediately start visualizing the complex, interconnected web of test types and techniques that comprise the broad world of software testing? Still, it’s not a simple matter of running a few tests and getting the green light. There’s a process to thorough software testing, which entails writing appropriate test cases, ensuring that you’re covering the right features and functions, addressing user experience concerns, deciding what to automate and what to test manually, and so forth.

You may decide that you want to do a little of each methodology or make up your own process. It doesn’t really matter as long as you have your process documented. That way, you can ensure all of the team are on the same page when it comes to projects across your organisation, plus any rogue testers can be directed to the process in order to straighten them out if need be. Manage your risk. Easy to say, sometimes hard to do. Especially if you have limited or no requirements. Having the team prioritise which functional areas need to be tested first, based on risk, will typically pay off. Ensure you invest a little bit more time up front in your planning and get those risky areas tested early, this will shakedown the critical code paths before you get too far down the test execution track and then run out of time.

Taking you deep into this ever changing industry is software test management consultancy Cania Consulting, comprised of industry leaders who specialize in software testing audit, strategy, and management. They use the techniques and insights provided in this book on a daily basis with their clients and are sharing their insider tips as a key resource for readers in the test management industry. As a young graduate I started looking for potential career opportunities and this eBook has shown me the beauty and complexity of the Test Manager profession from a theoretical standpoint. Explore even more details on Test Analysis.

Find your good enough threshold. Everyone wants perfect software, but budget constraints, business priorities, and resource capacity often make ‘perfect’ an impossible goal. But if perfection isn’t your goal, what is? Recognize that the goal of testing is to mitigate risk, not necessarily eliminate it. Your applications don’t need to be perfect — but they do need to support your business processes in time to leverage new opportunities without exposing companies to unnecessary or untenable risk. Therefore, your definition of quality may vary by application. As you initiate a project, get the right roles involved to ask the right questions: What constitutes perfect versus good enough versus unacceptable?

Isolation software testing advice for today : As you are developing and testing, team members need to make sure they are capturing everything more religiously than they might do if working in the office. For a tester, they could normally just show someone else (e.g. a developer) what happened on their screen, but when you are Teletesting, that is harder to. Use screen capture tools (like a free google extension – SpiraCapture) to capture what you are doing and then save the results into a tool like SpiraTest so that you have a record of what you just did. Similarly, make sure you document any changes or questions about requirements as a comment in the requirement. If you are not sure what the requirement means, add a question as the comment. If you are worried you will forget to clarify, just add a task to the requirement so that it is not forgotten. Teams should err on the side of adding tasks as well as comments to make sure things are not lost. Also as mentioned in item 3. if you need to get clarity on something, it’s fine to use IM tools, but make sure the results from that discussion make it into the tool being used for the source of truth. Explore a few extra details at https://cania-consulting.com/.