Zig-Zag Taste: Think Different While Testing

Introduction:

Everyone tells to think out of the box and think differently to achieve quality so that we can ensure a bug-free product. But How?

Testing a Software/Application is not that difficult if you keep few points into consideration. By adopting those points, you can feel the difference between a product and a Quality Product.

In this article, we are going to discuss how you can make an approach towards quality while testing a product by thinking slightly different. It is just a matter of enhancing your thinking beyond the boundary of Software Requirement Specification. Most often we are stick to the requirement. That is good but by doing this 

“Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known“— George E. P. Box

Usually, the aim of developers and testers are same to build a quality product, but their way of thinking differs. By taking one of the examples, Developer who thinks that his application should run, but on the other hand, a tester will think to crash that application by applying thousands of scenarios.

How to achieve solutions

Everything that you want to work well comes when you make effort on that by using your dynamic thinking. Following the requirement document is surely a good approach but putting supplements to this will make a difference.

In life, one says do not look back but in testing, Look back and go through past defects/approach. Apply those approaches to your application. Sometimes you would have a better approach which cans easy your job/efforts so always look for the alternatives. Be prepared with test-plan, which includes what kind of testing you are going to execute, before starting with testing. Plan your resources, pre-requisite for testing, your test data, environment setup, and other necessary stuff. Use tracking matrices like trace-ability matrix so that you would have better ideas to focus on particular critical areas.

Detailed Walk-through

Always keep in mind that execution of test cases is not the only thing we should focus on. There are other more areas as well which can improve your product. Even small tweaks in software testing can be an asset in your quality.

• Do not let-off your first bug: Trace the route cause and find more count of spots. Do not let off your bugs. They may lead you to have more count of bugs in software. A road blocker issue fixes will definitely give you something which you did not expect. So always, consider giving something extra on those areas, which you think may give extraordinary by going deep down.
• Expertise your target application: Enhance your areas of thinking about your target application. Explore application requirement thoroughly, have ideas on similar kind of app for behavior understanding so you will get an ideal behavior of the similar kind of features.
• Create a War Room sessions among the team: Everyone has a different perspective and different thinking of viewing an object. Organize a session with your peers and distribute the app among them. A session would of half an hour max but you may obtain many points after the session whether a bug or feature enhancement which will obviously go to help you in your software testing services.
• Believe in monkey testing:There is a stage where you have executed your test cases in the testing cycle then to spend some time on monkey testing where just go through the random modules and apply your scenarios as a user perspective. The benefit of this is, Some of the users who do not know about the application they just go through different modules randomly so you can prevent the occurrence of bugs especially which occur randomly. This will not take more time and can cover maximum critical areas.
• List out Critical/High priority bugs and put your efforts to those areas where these bugs occurred: During testing just have a look on your bug list and filter those areas where the critical bug count is high. List out those areas and put additional efforts on those areas.
• Spend time on those areas where no bug occurred and those areas where bug count is high: You may find a couple of areas in your application where you did not get a chance to have any defects. Show some curiosity on those areas and try to find the reason “why”.
• Increase R&D skills: Look at the similar apps available in the market. List out the features common with your development application. Understand the behavior of those features. Compare with behavior with your application SRS and Come up with new ideas to represent to the client.

Conclusion:

Therefore, I would conclude this article by saying that, Testing is something that depends on person to person how you are planning your testing activities. Document plays an essential role in testing. Strategies, identification of entry and exit criteria, how usefully you are using your resources these kinds of stuff puts a remarkable force in testing. Tester always has been that smart who can think slightly differ from the other users/developer. They must have the capability to break the working software by their thinking. Obviously, you need to have that X-Factor so-called Out of Box thinking. Stick with your requirement, create a plan and strategies, comply those efforts into implementation.  You always need to shuffle between different strategies of testing thus it will help you to identify where you need to put essential efforts which can provide you better results.

“While we may understand the problem, it is critical for us to change our thinking, our practices, and continuously evolve to stay ahead of the problems we face.”— Mike Lyles

You may like to go through Why You Shouldn’t Just Graze Over Quality Assurance Testing in E-Commerce?