By: Stan Lee Itzcoatl.
Everyone wants a faster QA team
The one common thing I hear from organizations looking to get my help is: “How can I speed up my QA testing phase?” The answer to this question depends on a number of factors. There is no cookie cutter approach to speeding up QA teams in all situations, but I will share a few selected ideas that I think will help. I’m going to identify suggestions within the QA team and some outside of the QA team. I’m including suggestions outside of the QA team since for years now I’ve witnessed situations where QA was unfairly blamed for factors outside of their control. My objective is to help you speed up the QA phase and identify issues that impact testing speed as a whole.
Optimal Test Automation
The QA team should have an efficient automation suite that is easy to use and provides the exact coverage you need. Analyze your project needs and make sure that your automation suite meets those needs. Determine whether you need speed, accuracy, coverage or something else. Optimal test automation speeds up regression testing and allows your QA team to finish cycles faster. If you don’t have solid automation then your test speed is suffering.
Optimal Test Cases
Design your test case strategy so that it aligns with what you need for each project. For example, having thousands of test cases that are 90 percent low priority might not be beneficial. Determine whether you need detailed coverage, speed, or something else. Even the tools you select will be impacted by your determination. During my work with clients I designed an approach where they stored high level (fast) test cases in the ticket system. This worked out amazingly well. QA and Developers had quick access to the test cases since they were inside the tickets they were directly working on. Again, design your test cases so you get exactly what you need.
Powerful Testing Tools
There are many free and commercial tools out there that can help to increase the speed of the entire QA process. The type of tools you select will depend on your project goals and the team’s expertise, but make sure that your QA team is keeping up to date on industry standard open source tools. These are usually the best ones out there. You can find tools for continuous integration, site monitoring, test case management, automation, deployments, and load testing just to name a few. When you analyze a tool make sure that it is helping to either create efficiency or increase speed. Do not adopt a tool simply because it appears to be sexy.
QA Involvement
There’s nothing worse than having QA wait for one big deliverable towards the end of the project timeline. That creates too much risk for everyone. Instead, follow iterative work basics and have QA involved early and often. QA should be testing every feature that gets completed along the way. Furthermore, the project team should not consider anything “done” until it has passed QA testing. I’ve seen instances where QA teams push back on testing and want to wait for a big deliverable. I’ve also seen when project managers refuse to allow QA to get involved early. Both situations are a recipe for delayed projects. QA should be involved early!
Bug Triage and Status Meetings
Bug triage meetings help to prioritize and assign work quickly to folks, especially assignments that are high priority. If your project team is not conducting a bug triage meeting then you are facing a lot of risk and slowing work down. QA should lead the bug triage effort, but representatives from the major teams need to be there as well. The triage team will not only assign work faster, but they will also defer or kill tickets that have zero to little impact on your release. This will save a lot of time and get everyone to work on what’s most important. If your teams already have too many meetings on their calendars then try adding the bug triage discussion to the end of the daily status meetings.
Goals, Prioritization and Accountability
There are sometimes external factors which impact the speed of QA testing. Some examples are fuzzy project goals, poor prioritization and lack of individual accountability. I’ve seen these factors create major problems for testing teams. For instance, a QA team will not be able to move quickly if goals are unclear. They might be working on the wrong tasks thanks to poor goals and prioritization. I’ve also seen situations where there is no accountability (from all departments) for missed tasks all throughout the life of a project. It is not logical to start waving red flags only when the QA team is under the spot light. The red flags should be waved consistently from the start of the project. Accountability has to be a big part of the team culture or your company will continue to fall into an endless loop of late projects. Address factors external to the QA team to make sure you are not unfairly blaming them for poor project management.
I’ve shared only a small amount of tips and experiences in this article. If you would like help setting up a modern and efficient QA process for your company contact Stanitz today. If you have an existing QA team, we can work with them and share our recommendations for greater efficiency and faster test cycles. Stanitz specializes in QA testing for both websites and mobile applications.