5 Tips for Effective Software Testing

Software testing is tough. There are hundreds of possibilities that need to be tested to assure quality of the software. However, it is not feasible to run all tests because one of the expectations of the top software testing company from its testing engineers is to keep the testing cycle short and still get accurateresults. Thus, a software testing expert often experiences a lot of pressure. Fret not. In this article, I will share 5 top tips that will help you to make your software testing process accurate and fast.

1. Analyze the test requirements

When a project is assigned to you,instead of jumping into the battleground of testing and quality assurance, you must start with understanding the software to be tested. You need to analyze its flow. As well as you need to define the functional expectations and user expectations of the software.

2. Define Priorities

Once you finish the analysis phase, you can start with the creating a list of tests that you may need to carry out on the software. The software testing and quality assurance process is big and you can’t run all the tests. Thus, based on the user and customer expectations, you need to define the priorities of different tests. The job is to understand the necessity of the test and assign it high priority. The rest can be in the second priority list and whether to run a test on it or not can be defined based on the process of your software testing company or client budget and preferences.

3. Define testing processes, tools and resources

There are various types of tests used by the top QA companies such as, white box testing, black box testing, functional testing and nonfunctional testing. There are various testing models as well, such as, manual testing and automation testing. Furthermore, there are open source and paid tools that can be used to run various tests. Thus, you need to define the testing types, models and tools beforehand.

4. Create a well-defined test plan

Once you are ready with different types of details, the task is to create professional test plan. This must be well-defined with all small to big details such as, role and responsibilities, tools, testing criteria, test cases, etc. You must have good skills to pen down an easy to understand, yet detailed test plan. The best software testing companies often have templates for the same. You can use this template as well make your reports professional.

5. Run a small test to check readiness

This is an important step before running thorough test cases on the software. Run a small set of tests on the software to see if it is ready to get tested thoroughly or not. This will help in assuring that you don’t waste time on a product that did not go through unit testing and has bunch of silly bugs which can waste time and efforts.

These are the top 5 tips that you must keep in mind to make your software testing process well defined and result oriented. This can be learned with experience or you can opt for one of the best software testing courses to learn these skills in detail.