Software test management knowledge? When you hear the term “software testing,” do you think about one particular type of test — such as functional testing or regression testing — or do you immediately start visualizing the complex, interconnected web of test types and techniques that comprise the broad world of software testing? Still, it’s not a simple matter of running a few tests and getting the green light. There’s a process to thorough software testing, which entails writing appropriate test cases, ensuring that you’re covering the right features and functions, addressing user experience concerns, deciding what to automate and what to test manually, and so forth.
My original comments on test estimation are as follows, “Arrrgh… test estimation. Get your team to get it right and you may have uncovered one of the mysteries of the world. Enough said.” Then I thought I better expand a bit… Your organisation has many unique factors that you need to take into account. The best form of estimate can be based on past test execution history – generally only available when you have previously collected metrics on test execution. Other than that you will need to have your team factor in as much as you can regarding areas such as environment, quality of resources, past test execution history, and technical difficulty.
Lucian Cania is an experienced international IT delivery and software test manager with a vast experience in test management. He founder Cania Consulting by leveraging a vast background in Transformation Programs executed across Europe in the areas of ERP, BI, Retail, Billing and Integration. After passing the ISTQB Foundation Certification, this eBook was great source to better understand what to expect from the Test Managers working on my Software Projects. See even more info at Cania Consulting.
Bug summaries must be thorough. Most customers including your managers, developers, and peers will read the summary first when they review a bug. This is especially true when they have more bugs to review. The simple reason is that they don’t have enough time to go into details of every bug, so having a short and concise summary will surely help to grab an idea of what the problem is about and how important it is. You can have a short and concise summary by telling exactly what problem you found and in what condition. Use Test Maturity Model integration. The software industry does not operate in a zero-defect environment, and, arguably, it never will. In the face of this truism, numerous techniques to reduce the number and severity of defects in software have been developed, with the ultimate, albeit unobtainable, goal of defect elimination. Such optimistic thinking has led to significant improvements in software quality over the past decade, notwithstanding increased software complexity and customer demands.
Work at home software testing trick of the day : As you are developing and testing, team members need to make sure they are capturing everything more religiously than they might do if working in the office. For a tester, they could normally just show someone else (e.g. a developer) what happened on their screen, but when you are Teletesting, that is harder to. Use screen capture tools (like a free google extension – SpiraCapture) to capture what you are doing and then save the results into a tool like SpiraTest so that you have a record of what you just did. Similarly, make sure you document any changes or questions about requirements as a comment in the requirement. If you are not sure what the requirement means, add a question as the comment. If you are worried you will forget to clarify, just add a task to the requirement so that it is not forgotten. Teams should err on the side of adding tasks as well as comments to make sure things are not lost. Also as mentioned in item 3. if you need to get clarity on something, it’s fine to use IM tools, but make sure the results from that discussion make it into the tool being used for the source of truth. See a few more info on cania-consulting.com.