Test in Phases
Several years ago I worked at a company that built large projects for the government. Vague enough for you? The budgets were typically several hundreds of thousands of dollars just for development. They were terrific projects to work on. We got to play with all kinds of technology to build our products. But there was one big problem.
Almost all of the testing was completed at the end of the project. So we would spend months developing a product. When it was “ready”, it would be shown to users and tested in browsers. That’s when we repeatedly would have this moment of “if we have money, then we can fix it.” The problem was, sometimes there wouldn’t be enough time or money to fix stuff. That is a depressing moment when you realize that what you’ve built, no matter how cool, just doesn’t work. It’s DOA, and there is nothing you can do about it. Happily, the problem got fixed with an approach called test early and test often.
Test early and test often is about getting answers to questions you didn’t know you had as soon as you can. It’s about learning and correcting as you go and not waiting until you can’t do anything about what’s broken.
The team that you are going to be working with will need to make sure that they include time to accommodate this process into the development process. I use a process that has three major phases. Alpha, Beta and Gold or ABG. Each phase has several iterations as we’ve previously discussed, but these larger moments allow for breaks in the work to do a dedicated series of tests to make sure we are on the right track.
The goal is to provide something to test with as early as possible. One way to do this is by adopting the ABG process so that you know there are at least three points at which a serious testing effort will happen. Even if you only do these three, you still have a significant improvement over the wait till the end approach.
The process might look something like this.
Alpha Phase
The product essentially works, but there might be significant design and functionality missing. So, you can see what the point of the application is, but you know you have a great deal of refinement to do. And that’s fine because it’s the first version! So you can put this in front of users and ask questions as well as run tests in emulators, devices and more.
Beta Phase
When testing the beta phase, we are looking at a mostly complete product now. The issues discovered in Alpha will have been addressed as well as any of the remaining work that needs to be fleshed out.
Gold
This is the last big delivery. The team will have addressed the issues from the Beta testing. Depending on the team, you might have one more small round of tweaks or the whole version will be completed. Regardless, the next step from here will be to launch.
Test early and test often. This is the only way that you will be able to know what is happening in the development and if what you are building is working. If you wait until the end of the project, you can miss some huge issues and then be out of time and money to fix them.
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This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.
