How to Improve Software Testing through Planning, Work Environment, Automated Testing, and Reporting

A lot of research has been done to identify the root causes of software startup failures. One of the main reasons for such failures turned out to be poor quality assurance during the software development process. The chief purpose of executing stringent quality assurance tests is to prevent the release of poor quality products. Small mistakes that slip through may lead to large financial losses.

The way to create high-quality software is to implement effective QA management that provides tools and methodologies for building bug-free products. Software quality management is an umbrella term covering three core aspects: quality assurance, quality control, and testing.

Software quality assurance (SQA) is the part of quality management that includes a planned set of organizational actions. The purpose of these actions is to improve the software development process, introducing standards of quality for preventing errors and bugs in the product.

Software quality control (SQC) is the part of quality management that includes a set of activities focused on fulfilling quality requirements. QC is about product-oriented activities that certify software products for their quality before release. The process of software quality control is governed by software quality assurance.

Testing is the basic activity aimed at detecting and solving technical issues in the software source code and assessing the overall product usability, performance, security, and compatibility. It’s not only the main part of quality assurance; it is also an integral part of the software development process.

This article will discuss the best practices of how to improve the software testing process and to increase the quality of your software products.

1. Plan the testing and QA processes

Test processes should be well-planned, defined, and documented. Good documentation is the tool that builds efficient communication within the software team. So, effective planning entails creation of quality and test plans for a project.

Test policy

A test policy is the most high-level document that is created at the organizational level. It defines the test principles adopted by the company and the company’s main test objectives.

There is no standard approach to test policy creation, but it typically includes the following:

• Definition of what testing means for the company,
• Test objectives of the organization,
• General standards and criteria for software testing in projects,
• Definition of testing terms to clarify their further usage in other documents,
• Listing of tools to support the testing process,
• Ways to improve the testing processes.

Quality management plan

A quality management plan is a document that defines an acceptable level of product quality and describes how the project will achieve this level. It’s not a mandatory document, but it will help you schedule all the tasks needed to make sure that the project meets your customer’s needs and expectations.

Key components of the quality management plan:

• Quality objectives
• Key project deliverables and processes to be reviewed for satisfactory quality level
• Quality standards
• Quality control and assurance activities
• Quality roles and responsibilities
• Quality tools

Test strategy

A test strategy is a more specific product-level document that derives from the Business Requirements Specification document. Usually, a project manager or a business analyst creates a test strategy to define software testing approaches used to achieve testing objectives.

The main components of a test strategy are:

• The scope of testing
• Test objectives
• Budget limitations
• Industry standards
• Testing measurement and metrics
• Defect reporting and tracking
• Deadlines
• Test execution schedule
• Risk identification

Test Plan

A test plan is a document that describes what to test, when to test, how to test, and who will do the tests. It also describes the testing scope and activities.

A good test plan should include the schedule for all necessary testing activities in order to control your team’s testing time. It also should define the roles of every team member so that everyone is clear about what is required. According to the IEEE standard 829, a test plan document should contain the following information:

• Test plan identifier
• Introduction
• Test items (the product and its versions)
• Software risk issues
• Features to be tested
• Features not to be tested
• Approach (Strategy)
• Item pass or fail criteria
• Deliverables (test plan document, test cases, tools, error logs, problem reports, etc.)
• Test environment (hardware, software, tools)
• Schedule
• Responsibilities

Here are some key guidelines for making the test plan more effective:

Make your test plan brief.

Be specific.

Update a test plan.

Share a test plan with your stakeholders.

Test cases

Preparation of effective test cases is an integral part of software testing improvements. According to the definition, given by ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board, the worldwide leader in the certification of competencies in software testing), “A test case is a set of input values, execution preconditions, expected results, and execution postconditions, developed for a particular objective or test condition, such as to exercise a particular program path or to verify compliance with a specific requirement.” The standard test case includes the following information:

• The test case ID
• Test case description
• Prerequisites
• Test steps
• Test data
• Expected result
• Actual result
• Status
• Created by
• Date of creation
• Executed by
• Date of execution

Use the following practices to write effective test cases:

Identify testable requirements.

Customer requirement.

Write on time.

Simple and сlear.

Unique test cases.

2. Employ test-oriented software development management

Implementation of test-oriented management approaches is a good way to improve the quality of software. One of the ways to achieve this is by using extreme programming (XP) — a software development methodology that aims to produce higher quality software with the ability to adapt to changing requirements.

Test-driven development

Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process in which tests are written before any implementation of the code. TDD has a test-first approach based on the repetition of a very short development cycle. The developer writes an automated test case before he/she writes enough production code to fulfill that test. This test case will initially fail. The next step will be to write the code focusing on functionality to get that test passed. After these steps are completed, a developer refactors the code to pass all the tests.

The following are the benefits of using the TDD approach:

High quality.

Optimization of development costs.

Simplification of code.

Positive effects on productivity.

Executable documentation.

3. Use a shift-left approach to start testing early and often

We have already described a test-driven programming practice inside an extreme programming framework. A shift-left testing approach reflects this idea and suggests conducting testing activities from the very beginning of the development process instead of making it a final step as traditional methodologies typically suggest.

Planning a testing strategy early.

Reviewing requirements.

Automating tests.

Prevention instead of reaction.

Team collaboration.

4. Conduct formal technical reviews

A formal technical review (FTR) is an activity performed by software engineers to reveal functional and logical errors at the early stages. An FTR is a group meeting at which attendants with certain roles ensure that developed software meets the predefined standards and requirements.

At the end of each meeting, a review report should be prepared to answer the following questions:

• What was reviewed?
• Who reviewed it?
• What findings and decisions were made?

5. Ensure suitable work environment for QA team

Work environment directly impacts employees’ productivity and attitude toward their job. Here are some ways to create comfortable work conditions and keep your team happy, engaged, and productive.

Define QA roles

Testing consists of various activities that are performed by different specialists. To organize a smoothly-run testing process, roles are specified at the planning stage in a test plan. There are six common roles in QA:

• Software test engineer
• Test analyst
• Test automation engineer
• Software development engineer in test
• Test architect
• Test manager

Each role has its own set of skills, responsibilities, and tools to operate with.

Give business training to your QA team

Provide the necessary pieces of training for your QA specialists to expand their knowledge.

Encourage communication

Collocate your testers and developers to improve communication efficiency. Face-to-face communication will help avoid misunderstandings and share effective solutions to problems encountered during tests. You also need a good team leader who will be able to effectively share feedback and ideas with testers. QA managers should encourage team members to speak about existing problems and other issues with the team that could impact productivity and efficiency. Retrospective meetings held by the entire development team at the end of each sprint or iteration are one of the ways to discuss achievements, problems, and plans for further work.

6. Implement user acceptance testing

End-user testing or user acceptance testing traditionally comes at the final stages of software development. Engaging end-users to test your application can help discover bugs that might not normally be found. It also proves that your software is production-ready and supplies your developers with user feedback during/after the production stage.

Alpha and beta testing are done at the pre-release stage. Alpha testing is carried out by internal stakeholders at the early stages of development. Business and end-users are often involved in alpha testing performed in the development environment. The feedback from internal teams is used to further improve the quality of the product and fix bugs. Beta testing is performed in the customer’s environment to determine if an app is ready for users.

Black Box Testing examines software functionality without seeing the internal code. That means testers are only aware of what an app should do without knowing how. This type of testing allows test teams to get the most relevant results comparable with end-user testing.

Test User Documentation

Any type of software developed has its User Documentation (UD). UD is a guide or a manual on how to use an application or a service. So, make sure you test your user documentation as well. Manuals for your software can also be tested by a team of end-user testers. Internal testers and tech writers take care of structure and navigation, while external teams help figure out if it’s actually usable.

7. Optimize the use of automated tests

If you really want to improve the quality of your software, then automated testing or using automation tools to run the tests is definitely worth taking into consideration. Test automation saves time, reduces human errors, improves test coverage and test capabilities, does batch testing and parallel execution. Here are main cases when applying automated testing enhances the process:

• cross-device and cross-browser testing
• regression and smoke testing
• load testing
• performance testing

There is a wide variety of automation testing tools. They can be both open-source and commercial. Selenium, Unified Functional Testing, Test Complete are the most popular ones worth checking first.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery

Continuous integration (CI) is a development practice that requires engineers to integrate the changes into a product several times a day. Each code piece runs the “integration tests” at every code change to detect errors and bugs quickly, and locate them more easily. A good practice is to combine the CI with the automated testing to make your code dependable.

Continuous delivery (CD) is considered an evolutionary development of the Agile principles. This method means that you can release changes to your customers quickly in a sustainable way. CD allows the commitment of new pieces of code when they are ready without short release iterations. Generally, you automatically deploy every change that passes the tests.

8. Employ code quality measurements

If you still wonder how to improve software testing, make sure your quality objectives are measurable, documented, reviewed, and tracked. There’s no single right way to measure code quality.

Let’s look at each of the main five aspects of software quality and explore how they can be measured:

Reliability. This indicator defines how long the system can run without failure. The purpose of checking reliability is to reduce application downtime.

Performance efficiency means the responsiveness of a system to execute any action within a given time interval. Performance efficiency can be measured using the following metrics:

• Stress testing provides the understanding of the upper limit of the capacity of the system.
• Soak testing checks how long the system can handle a certain load and when performance starts to degrade.
• Application performance monitoring is the detailed metrics of performance from the user’s perspective provided by special software.

Security is the capability of a system to protect information against the risk of software breaches and to prevent the loss of information. You can count the number of vulnerabilities by scanning the software application. The number of found vulnerabilities is a positive or negative measure of security.

• Deployment of security updates is the percentage of users that have actually installed a patch or security update.
• Time to resolution is the amount of time needed to fix a vulnerability.

Maintainability is the ability of the system to modify software, adapt it for other purposes, transfer it from one development team to another, or meet new business requirements with a degree of ease. A very simple metric of code maintainability is to check the number of lines of code in a feature or even the entire application. Software with more lines of code is harder to maintain.

9. Report bugs effectively

A good bug report will help make software testing more efficient by clearly identifying the problem and in this manner navigating engineers towards solving it. It must be a cornerstone and an efficient form of communication between a QA specialist and developer. A badly written report can lead to serious misunderstanding. Here are the guidelines for an effective bug report:

Provide solutions if possible.

Reproduce a bug before reporting it.

Clarity.

Screenshots.

Consider adding a bug summary.

The latest automated testing tools have built-in integration with bug-tracking systems. They can automatically report the bugs and track their status. There are also separate bug reporting tools like JIRA or Mantis.

Conclusion

If you want your company to be competitive and achieve a winning position in the IT industry market, you must produce very high-quality products. Improving the quality of software products will have the biggest overall impact on your business and its financial performance. When managing your work processes don’t save on testing, as the cost of mistakes may prove to be too high.