Continuous work makes a person restless and when a person becomes restless it means a robot is performing tasks without having any human element or emotions involved. The business world with its intense complexities has made it nearly impossible to compromise on the manufacturing or development of a product either a commodity or a virtual product like a software application. Tech individuals work day and night to make sure if the product they’ve developed or are developing is compatible with the user’s expectations or not. That is the reason the software development industry counts to be one of the most challenging industries for an individual to initiate a career.
With its critical nature of working, software development often sets heavy workloads on the quality assurance professionals. Pressures from management to ensure quality, tackling lengthy and time-consuming software development life-cycle stages (especially software testing) within the least possible time while ensuring effectiveness are important. These heavy responsibilities have made the lives of quality assurance teams full of burdensome. Although it’s the duty of a Q/A staff member to make sure a product is going from all these work procedures to lighten the burden upon the shoulders of your q/a team isn’t impossible either.
Someone has truly said that; “ It’s not the burden that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it”.
Deep down if you read the above quote twice, you’ll be able to grasp the hidden meaning of it. This claims that workload is not what actually matters, the thing that matters is the technique, the procedure, or the strategy you follow to carry it. For instance, if you get stuck in a maze and not being able to dig out the way to pass through it then you might be ending up your life in that maze. Similarly, if you do not know how to tackle your loads or a special strategy is not being designed to lighten up the burden of your SDLC team then you might be ending up with a disastrous product. Because some things demand careful steps.
Use of appropriate tools must be a part of your SDLC strategy – One of the easiest yet best ways organizations and leaders can do; to reduce the workloads of their quality assurance team members is to provide them a special set of software testing tools including bug management tools (that track, manages and record bugs effectively), Test case management tools (that efficiently manage test cases) and automation tools, etc.
Use of bug management tools makes it possible for the Q/A team to deliver high-quality software products while hunting and tracking maximum bugs or errors and ensuring that every detected bug is fixed. These tools assist teams in determining the priority and distribution of errors based on severity and importance. This proves to be a potential support development team focus on high-priority bugs first, rather than low-priority bugs. Therefore, overcoming major obstacles in the early stages of the development cycle indicates good opportunities for your development team and the overall success of your product.
Crowd Testing – Crowd testing uses individual users in a real environment to test applications, products, and software. Segmentation of these testers is being done by population-age, location, equipment, etc.-as well as expertise-usability, accessibility, payment methods, etc.-to provide internal teams with the exact test range they need from a device and geographic perspective. This way it makes sure that no matter where the customer is geographically located or what device they use, they can easily get a rich experience every time.
Crowd testing provides internal QA teams with test coverage that they can’t get anywhere else while helping them keep up with development needs. This method can be expanded almost without spending time and can be expanded infinitely. For instance, if an organization needs to test a specific function 30 times on a particular device type, crowd testing allows us to use 30 different testers to complete the work quickly and efficiently, rather than having the use of a single tester alone to test itself 30 times. This flexibility of crowd testing allows the internal quality assurance team to expand the test scale as per the varying needs of business or project.
Outsourcing – Another great way of making it possible to lighten up the burden of your quality assurance team is to outsource testing when it comes to expanding your testing capabilities and test coverage of the internal quality assurance team. With the help of outsourcing organizations can improve their testing capabilities by increasing the number of people running tests. Outsourcing is a static method to solve this problem: the cost may be fixed, but it may take a long time to fully increase the cost, and it is impossible to understand who is doing the test. The outsourcing approach also does not take into account the reality or the exploratory testing necessary to catch up with cutting-edge cases and unexpected customer journeys.
Beta Testing can also be considered to reduce workloads – Before launching a product to a population of users, the launch of the product to a subset of users is known as beta testing. Keep in mind that beta testers are not experts. It is cheap or sometimes completely free but this also accounts for an alarming threat of poor testing quality because testers in this case are not provided with incentives. While most brands can benefit from some form of beta testing, those with more loyal users will get more feedback and therefore better results.
Which approach should you go for?
Well, simplifying the working procedures for teams must be a great concern of managerial staff if they want their software products to be maximum bug-free and of good quality while reducing their team’s workloads. Considering this situation some strategies are mentioned above but this now depends upon your planning and decision-making abilities which strategy or a couple of strategies you implement to lighten up the workload of quality assurance staff for better delivery of software products.
