With the rise and fall of technologies, the world is rapidly transforming on a daily basis. Innovations and technologies emerge, some become a hit and some fail because of many hidden reasons. One of those reasons is the improper use of a new technique or method. On the other hand, the software development industry is also evolving and embracing the use of modern technologies as much as they can to have a win-win situation. But here lies the question; how can a win-win situation be possible for software development industry leaders? Well, the answer is simple. A win-win situation occurs when two parties are equally gaining benefits. In the case of software development, an organization’s quality assurance team and its Q/A efforts can prove to be a great asset. Tech-oriented company’s mere objective is to deliver a high-quality product to its targeted audience to gain popularity among the market and market-share vice versa.
To ensure a high-quality software product or service delivery, testing is an inevitable part of the development process. For the sake of being prominent among the competition, companies try their hard to seek and adopt new ways of improving their agility and quality of software products. One of the common approaches companies find fruitful to be at par and stay ahead in the game of maintaining and sustaining software quality is the adoption of test case management software. Such type of software helps the quality assurance team to augment their software testing processes, quality, and speed that subsequently leads to saving time and cost.
But that’s not all about test case management software. Still, many organizations are lacking to gain from the use of test case management software at its best. Considering this in mind, we have come up with some ways that an organization can adopt to ensure modern-day test management practices.
Let’s Discuss Them Out;
Establishment of a Central Test Repository – Testers might think that the absence of a central repository is a mistake, but then again, you will be shocked by its universality. The test manager regularly messes up by allowing each project to maintain its test library.
This is not a good habit that is not easy to get rid of. When your team manages so many test plans (multitasking is another drawback that affects the public), creating a separate test area for each project is then a good decision while ignoring interdependence. Test managers must consider the productivity gains that the central repository has for quality assurance teams. There may be other projects that cover some commonalities or have tested some of your scopes. In many cases, they may have discovered and fixed some defects that testers may “discover” again.
Creation of Test Cases at Often Times – Writing test case scripts is a time-consuming task. When your team writes the same test cases for multiple times, this won’t help. Even if they copy and paste (or download/upload), it will eventually lead to inefficiency and a waste of time.
Duplicate work has become a daily problem, and unless you know you are looking for it, it is not easy to find. Moreover, when you try to reduce repetition and increase reuse, the artificial nature of this effort wastes a lot of time and energy, making it unpopular and even less efficient.
Rise of Same Defects Again & Again – One of the common mistakes that testing teams usually make is that they raise the same defects with different ID’s, on different and often on the same projects. Duplication of defects also becomes another threat or problem for testing teams and efforts of testing may fail. Quality test case management enables you to have a look at the links between test cases and all related defects. When the team views the links, they can copy another instance of the defect instead of copying the defect.
This also provides another way for your team to spot the intensity of the error or defect-if it affects multiple projects or Scrum, the defect will need to be raised to the next severity level.
Interlinked Projects Have Their Own Project Areas – As a leader of your quality assurance team, it is your responsibility to influence program/department-level project management practices. For example, if your team is providing testing for medium and large projects, you may be staring at three to a dozen projects that require testing support. Now, suppose these projects have their own project areas on RTC, JIRA, or any other project you are using. Code branching, test documentation, mapping user cases to test cases, etc. will become highly disjointed. The same user stories must be copied or recreated in every project area where they are needed.
Defect Triage – Keep in mind that the impact of bad classification features extends beyond your team-they have the greatest impact on developers because these people will eventually fix defects. If your testers cannot effectively classify defects, your developers may end up dealing with defects that are not necessarily the highest priority. When you are about to release software to customers, the effectiveness of the classification process is the difference between delivering products that have resolved all issues that seriously affect customers and undelivered products.
Duplication will provide implicit prioritization-repeated defects should be considered more important than other defects, and will reduce the number of unique defects that actually need to be classified-save time and effort.
Use of Right Test Case Management Tools – To complement the efforts of your test case management, you need to implement the right tools that align with your business requirements. Planning, execution, and analysis of testing can all become much easier with the use of an appropriate tool.
Conclusion
We would like to conclude this article with a single question from you i.e If the implementation of a single software can bring such healthy opportunities for an organization, then consider that if it’s being utilized the way it has to be, then how much wonder an organization can do? Just ask once it to yourself then you would be able to realize that with the help of the above-mentioned practices, an organization could observe a significant yet healthy change in business efficiency.
