5 Practices for QA Teams to Deliver Fast
Key Strategies for Swift QA Deliveries
In order to meet the demands of frequent product releases without compromising product quality here are 5 practices that can help to shorten development cycles and keep up with frequent product releases while maintaining high product quality.
If your team is working under tight time constraints, consider the following tips. Based on my recent experience, these actions can lead to significant progress when deadlines or releases are imminent. And of course, there are numerous other useful practices you can adopt both before and during a release. But here are a few that has helped teams when they are at a crunch for time.
1. Break free from the classical responsibilities.
QA’s are a customer facing unit. They hear from their customers about issues and they experience what features they would like to see in the product. Use that in-depth expertise to participate in design discussions and offer input and suggestions to improve the product offering.
QA’s analytical mind, testing knowledge and experience helps them identify design flaws before anyone spends time coding. This significantly reduces cycle time and helps meet customer expectations.
2. Select your testing scope carefully.
Systems are complex and large. You can’t test everything and fortunately, you don’t need to. You can still be confident in the product you give the green light to if you focus on areas where significant changes have been made. Make it a point to sit down with your development team and understand which parts of the product will be touched with new or update code. Use this information to prioritize your testing effort. Use existing automation testing to handle other parts.
3. Prioritize bug fixes based on usage.
Fixing bugs is an integral part of any new release. But the big question is which bugs should you focus on? My answer for this is “usage data”. If you are using google analytics to see how uses are interacting with your application, you will have the information you need right there. Or, if you or product stakeholders know that one area of the application is rarely used, a bug in that part of the code gets low priority. If less than one percent of users are using a particular browser, issues specific to that browser will get low priority. But also, remember to pay attention you your users. If a bug got past, and users experienced it, those bugs should get priority fixes in the next release.
4. Stay close to the production environment.
Every QA has heard the comment “but it works on my machine!” … So, how do we avoid this situation?
As builds move through the development pipeline we must test the code under production conditions. So having a stage environment to stimulate our customers production environment is crucial.
5. Run regression cycle.
Run regression tests in the final phase of the product stabilization.
It’s recommended to conceptually model the product as a tree with a hierarchy of modules and component branches to help understand the product from customer perspective. When any branch is modified, the hierarchy will show what branches below will need additional testing.
The regression cycle can use a traffic light method, where each branch is tested, and if it passes all tests, it receives a green light. If a branch receives a yellow light, it means all tests passed, but with one or more reported warnings. The stakeholders discuss the issue at this point. Finally, if a branch receives a red light, one or more tests failed, and the team must stop and address the issue.
The regression cycle is automated, which means it takes only a few hours to run. Once all the branches have received a green light, the product is considered ready for delivery.
