Being a part of a quality assurance team in the software industry can be challenging. Testers are always expected to measure and meet quality standards. They always think like customers and ensure their project exceeds customer expectations with the highest quality achieved. But a paradox lies where all quality metrics are sidelined since testers emphasize a quantitative approach that includes a number of bugs, test cases written and executed, time spent on testing, defect leakage, etc. Testers have designed testing procedures where they replace quantity over quality, but they measure testing in quantitative numbers. QA teams should use software testing tools and take a quantitative approach for meeting software testing quality metrics.
Measuring Software Testing Metrics With Numbers Alone
It is necessary to justify testing approaches since every path in software testing is quantitatively measured. This is an underlying reason why the quality of testing is reduced. For instance, QA managers assess their team’s efficiency by viewing the number of bugs logged. It is time QA teams change their approach to testing and focus on the quality of testing, instead of just emphasizing on rigorous testing.
Changing Habits – Preferring Quality Over Quantity
With enterprises going agile, shrinking cycles and testing being pushed to the end of each cycle, testers are required to test apps in the shortest time possible. They use the latest software testing tools to perform smoke testing for each and every release to ensure applications meet user requirements. This increase in the number of tests will not help tackle critical situations. In reality, it is not the number of bugs that counts, but the essence of each bug that can earn a bad reputation.
Even though teams may have come up with a certain number of bugs, there may be serious issues with an application with respect to its quality. Software testing companies have laid down a foundation for quantitative measures. This is one of the biggest factors to consider when enterprises redefine their software testing metrics with respect to quality and quantity.
Quality May Vary From Customer to Customer
In a digitally growing world, the approach to quality assurance is entirely different and focuses only on attaining customer satisfaction. Enterprises take a customer-driven approach to ensure software quality where problems of the end-users are resolved. To achieve this objective, it is important to align testing efforts and use effective software testing tools which also helps in deciding what to fix and what not to. Thus, it gives a clear picture for the stakeholders, allowing QA teams to streamline their testing efforts.
Staying on The Track
We have observed that testers focus too much on increasing their bug count and end up drifting away from the objective of testing what they were supposed to test. However, quality test cases are extremely crucial and if testers lose track due to increased bug log count they may fail at achieving quality objectives.
So, testers should not push quantity to drive quality. Quality should only be a major objective of achieving customer satisfaction.
