7 Important tips for Quality Analysts
The Quality Assurance Testers or Engineers play a major role in the overall development of a software development lifecycle. It is essential as it helps the organization maintain the standard of the software built. They aim to detect minute or significant errors that can cause problems in the long run. It is an essential part of an overall software development project.
For efficient QA testing, you need to know certain tips that will help to avoid the messy testing procedures.
1. Conceptualize and normalize QA process
By conceptualizing the tests, It can effectively determine what to automate in your QA testing process and how to prioritize the automation. And with the help of maintaining a standard in creating the QA scripts with proper naming convention, you can understand and follow the tests better without hustle.
2.Make Use of The Right Tools for Testing Purposes
Some of the testing processes are automated and require specific tools for execution. Proper testing tools are efficient for the tester to follow the blueprint of the testing strategy. Some of the best tools used for the automated testing processes are appium, fiddler, confluence, Gatling, Selenium, SoapUI, Jenkins, etc. These are a few of the many top testing tools used by the QA testers for their testing project.
3. Ascertain Your Test Cases
QA testers need to know the product like the back of their hand. They should be familiar with all of its features, including old features, as well the different use cases their customers have. This knowledge enables them to determine what they are testing and how to test it in the most thorough way.
Take the time to learn the system and plan the different test cases in detail to ensure all important use cases are covered and run the tests. This will help you prioritize and focus.
4. Determine the Pass/Fail Criteria for Your Tests
The pass/fail criteria for each feature known as the acceptance criteria. As a QA engineer, you should transform those requirements into pass/fail criteria for each test you run. If you’re not sure about the measurements you are setting, talk to the Manager about it.
5. Look for The Quality and Fulfillment Of Requirements
Before starting the software development and testing work, make sure you acquire all the information from the client regarding the requirements. If the software is customer-oriented, then you need to take care of the user experience as a complex interface can disturb the users, and you might need to start again from the scratch.
Software testing follows the six quality criteria such as usability, efficiency, portability, maintainability, reliability, functionality. The QA testing results must be communicated with the development team for giving them an idea about whether the application is meeting the requirements of the client or not. It will help the testers to detect and fix the further occurring errors in the software within time by keeping the quality and requirements in mind.
6. Prioritize and Categorize Your Tasks
The era of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) means ongoing releases and updates, which means we don’t have enough time for in-depth testing of every new feature and fix. Therefore, sometimes you need to give up on end-to-end testing.
The best way to deal with this situation and reduce risks is to prioritize and categorize. First, determine the importance of each feature, i.e its business value. If you’re not sure, speak to the Manager. Second, evaluate how complex the testing for each feature will be, i.e how many resources it will take from you and your team. Then, you can intelligently decide which types of tests to do and when to do them. These decisions can then be reflected to the development teams and to PM, who can plan their own work accordingly. This will also reduce your own stress levels.
7. Don’t ever lose the focus on your end goal
As a QA tester, your ultimate aim is to achieve the highest possible quality and add adequate value to the product. Never fail to keep check on this end-goal while accomplishing your QA tasks. And with the help of automated testing, you can effectively improve the end-results with rigorous testing to elevate the level of quality of projects.