Tester and Documentation Best Couple Ever...
In my Software Testing career till now, I never heard people talking much about software testing documentation. In general what actually the testing documentation is ? Is it a process of utilizing one’s time as a tester by writing Test Documents like Test Case, Test Plan, Status Report, Bug Reports, Project proposal and so on?
Many Testers start losing interest in documentation thinking that it’s monotonous work. Is really documentation soo…? boring thing in a Tester’s life, do writing document’s for the same software over and over again really irritates a tester. I think these points can be a good topic for discussion among the testers .
What if a tester’s make it their passion for collecting all the data’s related to their projects , preparing documents , managing excel files , storing all the details in their drive for their reference in future while working will it be the same monotonous work .
I am here sharing my Experience with Documentation :
We were working on a project at our one of the Client Company, according to my experience we can consider the client as an angry bird, it sounds funny but is real.
There they found some major issues from end user having an impact on us which was really not good for us, and as usual everyone in the company started blaming all the testers. Those were multiple crashes due to the syncing of data between the database and cloud leading to the situation where App was not responding properly. But there the project manager was not willing to do anything in this situation. Their sales team members came to us and started shouting at me what you are doing man we are getting many issues from our many users. Can you guess what I was thinking that time, under this situation also I was quite happy because I was having proof of all those issues already logged in my bucket.
This was a lesson for me in my testing Career, I realized the importance of documentation and from that day I started working more on documents and created testing documents like Test plan, Test cases, sanity testing checklist, bug report and much more.
So what we do…
In my previous project, we spend very less time on documentation. We interact a lot with the developers and product owners to get the requirement details. According to those requirement details, we first prepare a Test Approach Document in which tester describes the feature s/he is testing. Provides a brief description of the functionality before and after adding the feature so that it become easier to work with developer and tester, what needs to be tested, exit criteria that we easily decide, for what scenarios the automation scripts are covered and this document will get verified with the developer and product owner. If they feel that everything is covered then we go ahead with testing and if not then we do the required suggested changes and again send for the review process.
“Pretty good testing is easy to do (that’s partly why some people like to say ‘testing is dead’– they think testing isn’t needed as a special focus because they note that anyone can find at least some bugs some of the time). Excellent testing is quite hard to do.”— James Bach
Why are document important?
We regularly read various articles on testing technologies and methods, but how many of us have seen articles on documentation before? No doubt there are few, Is it really that documents are not important? No, it’s important because we haven’t yet realized the importance of documents.
Most companies do not give even a little importance to the documentation as much they give to SDLC process, they even develop their product without any documentation. The fact is that careful documentation can save an organization’s time, efforts and money and the main TESTER’S.
Here are few important software testing documents:
1) Test Plan
2) Test Data
3) User Acceptance Report
4) User Documents/ manuals
5) Test summary reports
6) Daily QC Checklist
7) Weekly Status Report
8) Test Strategy
9) Traceability Report
10) Test Log , Mind Maps
11) Bug Reports
12) Test Data
13) Fixed Issue List and much more…
Time consumption to make documents...
But sometimes I think that these all are unnecessary Documents and testers waste their time for all these. I don’t know what is the actual reason behind this bullshit process? If Tester avoids much documents work then may find more and more issues. Sometimes verifying documents will take half of the day. And tester gets more and more pressure from management for a document.
So as per me how to balance....
Major problems are how to manage all documents? Documents are more important for testers and team. Whenever I perform testing at the same time only I used to manage all documents because if you forgot to document it, then you again have to come back in flashback to recall everything again in order to prepare the test document. In my previous project, one of the testers who really doesn't like to make documents was in trouble , although he worked very hard but he was unable to conclude and submit all the work he did in the whole testing cycle . After getting some work pressure from the team lead he started collecting all those stuff and for these all it took half of month and lots of rework. If any random issue is observed that time you can mention in notepad / xyz file and store all the log files and after when you get time will try to reproduce and log those defects .It really sound’s good , at the same time, two task’s are getting completed parallel . Set your goals e.g. when you should complete test cases for a module, when to complete retesting of test cases for a module within specified time frame etc. If you are a senior person in the team, help others to learn and share your experience with them so that they can work more smartly . If you are passionate about software testing you will feel all these things more interesting rather than boring work.
“Documentation will always keep a TESTER in safe side because they have a written proof what they are doing and what they did in past .”