Do you know what’s the secret behind the success of some people? They never lose hope and accept the challenges they come across their way and then continue their journey via putting in every possible effort from their side. Isn’t it amazing? For sure it is!
We often forget that challenges, difficulties, and risks are a part of life. It’s never the best decision to step back because of facing these hurdles. However, creating an easy path towards your success is the biggest exam you’ve to pass in your whole life. As a software engineer or software expert, it’s never a simple and easy job for you to come up with creative features with the best product quality for meeting the expectations of your end-users. However, it’s a part of your duty and now it depends upon you how you tackle the challenges that come in your way to do so. We all know that developing a software product or app that meets customer expectations and helps an organization to be productive, demands some extra care, attention, and efforts yet there’s nothing in this world that is impossible to achieve.
What do we mean by inefficient software testing? Well, inefficient software testing process means that there lies some errors or vulnerabilities in the codes written by developers, writing inappropriate test cases, ineffective management of tests, repetition of tasks, and the list goes on. Every inefficiency caused, can pose a great threat to an organization.
Here in this article, we will be focusing on eliminating the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of test cases. Writing appropriate and well-aligned test cases makes a project strong and powerful, so let’s discuss how this will be made possible.
Always be aware of the upgrades in the product – In the software development industry, it’s important to beware of the new versions of software and applications. For this purpose, your Software Requirement Specification document must be revised often to cope up with the market standards and competition. Moreover, you make little changes like fixing any defect or error or you cope up with short time windows, often your Software Requirement Specification is left unchanged. It is therefore mandatory to update it along with the project upgrades.
Straight forward descriptions must be written – Story-telling and descriptions are two brothers of the same writing family, yet opposite from one another. When you write test cases you must be careful about the difference between story-telling and descriptions. A description must be simple, crispy yet informative for developers. It must not cover lengthy stories and paragraphs that would make developers bored and off the track.
The crucial role of User Personification – Personifying users is an important element when it comes to writing effective test cases. You might not understand the significance of personification if you don’t know what it means.
Personas are fictional entities that help in defining the scope of users. It provides a software engineer with an idea about how users from different backgrounds and domains will respond and utilize your software products and apps. One must never underestimate the power of these fictional characters because these would help you out in writing productive test cases.
Vigorous use of test case management software/tools – Are you the one who wishes for stable release cycles? Then the use of an appropriate test case management software or tool is said to be a necessity for you. This way it’s possible to make your processes transparent and every single team member on the project can be on the same page about the project status. Moreover, such types of tools or software allow quality assurance teams even to detect deadlines for the bugs or defects that are left untreated. Yet there are some organizations and quality assurance teams that are reluctant to use test case management software. However, they need to update their knowledge base that these tools and software are just a helping hand for them.
Target 100% Test coverage yet be realistic – The scope of testing is an important aspect of ensuring the robustness of any software. Before diving into test cases, it is important to strive for 100% test coverage. Take a moment to plan your test cases to cover every component and function specified in the SRS document. But keep this in mind that be realistic even if you set your target to achieve 100% coverage because unrealistic expectations often become a cause of disasters.
Think out of the box – Humans are considered to be superior as compared to expensive machines and tools because they have unique and critical thinking abilities. Their curious brains make them different. But what if manual software quality assurance professionals do not utilize their unique thinking capabilities? For sure effectiveness and efficiency would never get achieved. That’s the reason being stuck to a two-three page test case document just because it has been approved by the customer, makes the team unproductive because they’ll never come out with the box ideas for writing the best test cases.
Know your priorities – wrt test cases – Software engineers need to be very organized and managed. They must know which of the test cases must be set out on top of the priority list and which of them on the least priority. This would enable software testers to be more effective and efficient.
Endnote
In the pursuit of developing the best quality software product, software testing shows a ray of light in the absolute darkness of risks and hurdles. Yet an inefficient software testing process can add more troubles to your life as a software engineer. If you as a software tester are passionate about being effective, efficient yet productive you need to dig out shortcuts yourself to ease your life as a tester. A small list of shortcuts for writing productive and successful test cases is mentioned above for your assistance but don’t limit your knowledge to these only. Always update your knowledge base concerning both your project and organizational requirements.
