QA Time Constraint
Things to think about when time can impact testing
There are only so many hours in a test cycle. Any given company there's always more test than there is time to complete them. Obviously every product manager wants their test to be run at every release.
Yes QA Testing time is Finite.
Five Things I Have Learned about QA Time Constraints
Here are some of the things I have learned over the years that have made managing short test cycles. Not all of these strategies apply to every situation - many of these are from different companies with different test cycles - but they can at least help QA move testing forward.
- Propoer Planning prevents Poor Performance - QA Project leads should have an understanding of major changes that are being done in the upcoming release to decide what areas the team should focus more on. For example, if many changes were don't to support mobile, then probably less testing should be done with print actions.
- Acceptance Testing - Have a checklist of key functionality that should be working and tested in every release. These should always be working.
- Automation Rocks- We all know the value of automation testing - it can certainly help QA test more in a short amount of time. The downside is that QA needs to monitor the results for False Positives and False Negatives. Manual testing may miss some "obvious" bugs because testers are rushing through a test to find obvious bugs. Automation is great because it can run tests a 1,000 times the same way. It's not going to miss something because the tester is rushing through to find the most obvious bugs.
- Find Bugs Early as Possible - Use Critical Path testing to find bugs early in the test cycle. Work with the Product and Marketing team to identify all the critical paths with various products and services. The earlier you find blocker/critical bugs the better it is for everyone.
- Check List - Having a physical checklist helps to make sure that the product is well tested. This helps identify when you have to balance testing with offshore teams and make sure that everything has been touched. I have found a checklist is a way to track that testing is being done.