Time is a valuable resource for an individual as well as an organization. A person is considered to be successful only when he/she has outstanding capabilities for managing time. The business world is becoming more complex day by day with the advancements in technology and a race to satisfy customers according to their expectations. But when it comes to the software development industry, time is considered to be the single most important success factor because every phase in the development life-cycle depends upon the effective planning of time. The more time it requires an organization to develop and test software, the more competition arises in the market. That’s the reason testers are usually under great pressure to test the software products and applications in a limited time.
But time is not something that can not be controlled. It’s just a matter of a great strategy and planning. You might be thinking now that how is it possible to test in a short time? Well,
to meet the needs of end-users, with zero defects and no impact on quality while performing software testing in a limited time, maybe a huge challenge for testers. Yet not something impossible to happen.
In this article, we will provide you an understanding of some of the reasons why testers are short of time for testing, and also we will provide you with some efficient ways of testing that would surely take you out of this (short of time) situation.
Why are testers short on time?
Fallacious Estimation – Unrealistic and fallacious expectations usually lead organizations to face big challenges. A good and accurate estimation of testing must allocate separate time for tasks such as test data preparation and determining test readiness (i.e. smoke test and sanity test). Appropriate time must be allocated to the maintenance of small tasks on the execution of test cases by ensuring the test cases maintainable and sustainable. Because during execution, test cases may undergo some minor changes, therefore, there must be a specific time to adjust these changes.
Exploratory testing must be considered while making a plan of scheduling time according to every aspect of testing because human observation of the smallest things, curiosity about how that happened and why this happens, and creative abilities are significant to ensure the quality of the software product.
Careful estimation also means having an almost accurate assessment of the time it will take the team to communicate about different concerns of the testing like meetings, code reviews, test management tools, etc.
Moreover, every project needs a capable team. If there are members who are less experienced and are not familiar with the selected test management tool, then compensatory time must be allowed for their training and learning curve.
Technical Mess – Failure of basic tests when deployed to the Q/A environment and problems in back-end servers can be a cause of great technical mess that would ultimately result in the wastage of valuable time of testers. This means that some organizations are not concerned about the Q/A environment and are expecting from testers to be able to provide them with 100% accurate results within their predefined time. Whereas in reality, that’s something that leads organizations to face time management challenges.
No proper agreement between parties – For teams following Agile or SAFe, this may be a rare problem because they are in a close circle, but many teams are still facing this issue of when DevOps and QA should receive deliverables from each other Disagreements or poor communication. Therefore, the results are delayed.
How can testers deal with these time management problems?
Time is something that can be your great friend, but it depends on you if you want to befriend it or not. Being a tester you have to make a balance between managing your tasks and time. Successful testers are considered to be the best friends of time. How can you as a tester become its friend? Let’s grab your attention to some of the key points;
- Accurate estimation of tasks, test tools, and processes must be the first step in your time management plan.
- Use test management tools for Jira, that best matches your business requirements and testing objectives. The effective the test management tool, the efficient the testing will be and you will be able to complete your testing tasks before deadlines, and a reduction in the amount of preparation and reporting time could be made possible.
- Each team must tailor its needs based on available resources, tools, and existing processes.
- Data from past projects aids in estimating how long the test cycle will take, what obstacles were encountered, what risks were considered, and which errors were reported.
- You must have a checklist of questions with you to effectively plan the testing process;
- What are the pivotal functionalities of the project?
- Which of the functionalities has the highest financial impact?
- Which of the modules of the project are of high-risks?
- Which test cases cover the major functionalities in a limited time?
Analyze productivity and progress frequently – Don’t make status reports a deliverable just for the benefit of external teams. It’s your responsibility to ensure that you are carefully monitoring the routine goals and the ways to achieve it. Besides, please make sure not to fall into the classic problem of “speed and quality”.
Conclusion
Time management is key to the success of many businesses. Software testing can be guaranteed with 100% results, only if every phase of it is allotted with a specific time. Division of time according to the priority of tasks helps testers to be able to serve as at their best. The thing that matters in testing is careful planning. To boost up the testing processes, the use of test management software and tools is significant. But for this purpose, organizations must provide a special set of training to its quality assurance team members, so that testers would not get blamed in the end.
