Ever heard the phrase; “Dog-eat-Dog”? You must have heard it before, and it means ‘fierce competition’. There’s intense competition nowadays in the business world to cope with the demands of quality by the customers. Quality is considered to be the key success factor in a competitive market. When it comes to software development, quality indirectly means if the product has undergone enough software testing or not? Testing is performed to ensure that the product is safe and secure before it is launched in the market. Software testing is a fascinating profession. It requires a combination of technical and business know-how so that testers would be able to know the ins and outs of the application under test. It requires creativity to determine the best way to test the application.
Along with the fascination of software testing, there lie some challenges as well that include what to test, when to test, when the testing is done and what should be the best practices to conduct testing. These challenges may turn out to be worsened for organizations when it comes to testing remotely. In the current scenario, where Covid-19 is posing deadly threats to the business world, professionals are now asked to operate in “work from home” mode. But a process like software testing can be very difficult in these times irrespective of other business operations. But the implementation of the use of appropriate test management tools has left many testing professionals facing challenges with remote testing, appalled.
Remote testing teams – Due to the deadly Covid-19, many businesses were bound to operate from homes and not from offices in order to abide by the policy of social distancing. This remote driven working environment greatly affected many sectors including the software development industry as well. For instance in general how much we get distracted at our homes when we think of to start working on a project or task. Sometimes social media distracts you, sometimes your family distracts you or something else happens.
Testing is an indispensable part of the software development life-cycle that suffered a lot in a pandemic. Testers might have faced challenges pertaining to the communication barriers, connectivity issues, and even asynchronous working schedules. But some organizations successfully handled this situation by in time implementation of the use of test management tools, for the sake of not facing any decline in their market share and return on investment. Test management is important to streamline all your testing procedures especially when it comes to working remotely.
Test management tools are considered to be the one-stop solution to all your testing problems. Let’s drag your attention to its prominent fortunes that organizations have observed while working remotely;
Coordination and communication challenges – Since remote teams’ work differs from the work they perform at physical offices and the most influential barrier to the difficulty in testing operations is due to ineffective communication. Concerning this, it is recommended to schedule daily short meetings to strategize the overall testing process while sharing work status with the team. Now it is the responsibility of the test manager to ensure that every team member is involved. It is good practice to share the summary of the discussion in case someone misses it.
The remote QA test team must provide timely feedback and reviews for the sake of testing a specific task. Testers are then required to communicate the completion status at the exact time. A better way is to use test management tools to update the team’s work progress. Team members can access and check task status anytime and anywhere. This is especially useful if their task depends on your task.
Without discussing the concerns about test cases, test plans, and test reports it is difficult for testers to detect errors and glitches, and even if they become successful in hunting defects, they may face problems to fix problems, without coordinating with other team members. The success of a team relies specifically on the collaboration between all the quality assurance team members. Test management tools make sure that the developers and the quality assurance team are on the same page. It also aids in the reduction of communication barriers and lack of in time transmittal of information.
Improved Test coverage and reduction in the duplication of data – Managing testing in excel sheets with different data sets is often challenging and unhelpful when it comes to testing complex software products and applications remotely because it involves manually trying different data sets for a specific test step. Test management tools can make it simple and easy to repeat the existing manual tests through various data sets while increasing the coverage of existing manual tests.
Test management tools help in the reduction of data duplication that conventionally manages requirements, tests, or defects. It enables everyone (from business analysts to developers, testers, and QA managers) to have an opinion about the improvisations made.
It allows team members to have a clear-cut view of the following: requirements, tests, and defects-ensuring proper coverage exists.
Besides this, to maintain a proper record of test artifacts (test cases, scenarios), log, and track detailed defects. it is important to implement the use of special test management tools. In case of working with a team of remote testers, this is the only way to visualize the quality inspection process, to gather all test cases in one place, and to have the opportunity to view and analyze the results and compile reports on all use cases.
Final Thoughts
Since we can not predict for how long businesses have to operate in “work from home” mode and software testing can not be compromised at any cost because the rate of satisfied customers depends upon the quality of the product you offer. Therefore, It is recommended for organizations to take advantage of the test management tools at this time of need and make wonders in the market via satisfying customers while meeting their product expectations.
