Testing is an essential part of software engineering, but how do you make sure that your testing activities are aligned with your software quality objectives? In this article, you will learn about some best practices and tools that can help you plan, execute, and monitor your testing efforts to achieve the desired quality outcomes.
Before you start testing, you need to define what quality means for your software project. Quality objectives are measurable and specific goals that reflect the expectations and requirements of your stakeholders, users, and customers. They can cover various aspects of software quality, such as functionality, reliability, usability, performance, security, and maintainability. You can use quality models, such as ISO 25010, to guide you in identifying and prioritizing the relevant quality attributes for your software.
1.Define specific and measurable quality objectives. 2.Develop a comprehensive test strategy aligned with the objectives. 3.Create a detailed test plan and document test cases. 4.Prioritize testing activities based on criticality. 5.Implement continuous integration and testing practices. 6.Utilize automation tools for efficient testing. 7.Incorporate performance and security testing. 8.Establish an effective defect management process.
Every company should establish a Quality Engineering framework that fits their delivery model, whether supported by Agile software development or by Waterfall approaches. With waterfall, the QA aspects tend to be more solid because the testing is extremely thorough with elaborated documentation/protocols and an ample testing time period with testing having its own phase. However, the Time-To-Market (TTM) of the product is extremely low, as product releases arrive to Production only every once in a while. In Agile, a solid Quality System in place can solidify a strong QA foundation with test automation in Unit, Integration and GUI levels while delivering value at a high frequency with reasonable flexibility on testing documentation.
Once you have defined your quality objectives, you need to design test cases that can verify and validate them. Test cases are sets of inputs, actions, and expected outputs that can be executed to check if the software meets the quality criteria. You can use different types of testing techniques, such as unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and acceptance testing, to cover different levels and scopes of software quality. You can also use test design methods, such as equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, or decision tables, to generate effective and efficient test cases.
For embedded system software testing, also bear in mind to incorporate with the system and/or hardware test engineers while designing the test cases, as all these components under test can be highly integrated together. In addition, an Interface Communication Protocol (ICP) should have been set up in between the interacted components. Software should be tested in accordance with the ICP as well. Note that it could be trivial and time elaborating. Test automation would be highly helpful in this regard.
Test automation is the process of using software tools to execute test cases automatically, without human intervention. Test automation can help you align your testing with your quality objectives by increasing the speed, accuracy, consistency, and coverage of your testing activities. You can use various test automation tools, such as Selenium, JUnit, Cucumber, or TestNG, to automate different types of testing, such as functional testing, regression testing, or behavior-driven testing. You can also use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools, such as Jenkins, GitLab, or Travis CI, to integrate test automation into your software development lifecycle.
The easiest but most effective way to uncover bugs and avoid regressions is to automate tests. Testing regressions can be boring and error prone if done manually. It would also require a lot of instructional documentation and training. Investing in good test automation tools and scripts would not only save lots of times for QA engineers, it would also give a lot of power to developers so that they can test their features before merging their work to release branches. - Add unit tests when new code behavior is added. - Add integration tests when a part of system is modified which needs some interaction. - Add functional tests to test end to end features. - Add testing scripts to automation tools to run above tests periodically.
Test results are the outcomes of executing test cases, such as pass, fail, or error. Test results can help you align your testing with your quality objectives by providing feedback and insights into the quality status and progress of your software. You can use test management tools, such as TestRail, Zephyr, or qTest, to organize, track, and report your test results. You can also use test metrics, such as defect density, test coverage, or test effectiveness, to measure and evaluate your testing performance and quality achievement.
Tracking and reporting unit-test and automation test results over time provides a hard qualitative metric of your software. Those metrics can be used to create goals, celebrate achieving those goals, or just hold developers accountable for maintaining a high testing standard in an organization. "Codecov" is a popular solution which provides a lot out of the box.
You can also use this party integrated error capture software to pick up on production, staging bugs. These will allow visibility into ongoing and new, uncovered, regression errors that you can then use to update the existing regression testing site. Iteratively and with monitoring to keep pace with constantly updated software.
A random thought on the test coverage: while the majority of tools are capable of calculating the metric of code coverage that tells the percentage of code base is covered with tests, attention should also be paid to the metric of requirements coverage that can tell which requirements specification tags are tested and which are not.
Test processes are the set of activities and tasks that you perform to plan, prepare, execute, and evaluate your testing efforts. Test processes can help you align your testing with your quality objectives by ensuring that your testing is systematic, structured, and repeatable. You can use test process improvement models, such as TMMi, CMMI, or ISTQB, to assess and improve the maturity and capability of your test processes. You can also use test process improvement methods, such as PDCA, DMAIC, or Kaizen, to identify and implement test process improvements.
Testing is not a one-time activity, but a continuous and iterative process that requires alignment with your software quality objectives. By following the best practices and tools discussed in this article, you can ensure that your testing activities are relevant, effective, and efficient for achieving the desired software quality outcomes.
For some regulated industries, one of the software quality objectives should be to meet the regulatory and compliance requirements set forth by the regulations and/or relevant national/international standards.
A random thought on the boundary value analysis: typically, for an input parameter in the range of (a, b), test the boundary values (a-d, a+d) and (b-d, b+d) should suffice. In contrast, if it is for parting with security testing, then you might want to inject in more invalid, malformed, or unexpected inputs for the purpose of revealing potential security (and/or quality) issues.