Software Testing – Due Diligence

Software Testing has always been the need of the hour to evaluate how well an application/product has evolved to serve its intended purpose. Software testing process and reports accrued thereby helps the product owner to decide whether the product is market ready or requires more quality time to refactor the product so as to provide the most business value.

The process starts with the Test Execution Plan. There are numerous factors to be considered at this stage but not limited to

• Extensiveness of required Domain knowledge
• Number of test cases to be executed
• Number of resources required for execution

In addition to the above, Test Lead’s experience plays an important role during the estimation process. Due to versatile development methodologies being followed, the product/project requirements may not be finalized at the project inception phase.

The next stage would be writing proper Test Cases. The approach for generating test cases would be to analyze and identifying the requirements.

Few steps to be followed for effective test cases

• Objective of testing
• Define a format for a test case
• Cover all Functional requirements
• Cover all non-functional requirements
• Requirements should be traceable and maintainable
• Detailed steps to perform testing
• Test data

Now that we are done with the test design, here comes the core part of a process – EXECUTION.

Test Engineers executes the derived test cases against the build and log any bugs with appropriate severity level along with steps to re-produce the bugs. Any supportive documents in the form of attachments shall be associated with the bug log. A Test Report is generated after test cases are executed and will be submitted to the project stakeholders.

The process resumes once the development team releases the next build with fixes. The relevant test cases are executed again to verify the fixes and the status will be duly updated. This cycle continues until all the test cases are passed.