Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of weekly testing, I have an unpopular opinion about software build schedules and software testing.
Having the quality assurance group test a new build once a week is more effective than nightly software builds.
Reasons why:
- Having more people look at a software product regularly allows for more feedback to the coders.
- When the coders know that QA is going to be making assessments regularly it adds a greater incentive to get things more polished.
- It allows the QA group to get familiar with the end product sooner. They can test out their test cases and find any discrepancies between their understanding of a requirement and the coders’ understanding of a requirement.
- It gives greater confidence to the team that the software will pass verification testing when the time comes.
Most of the test plans I’ve written describe attempting complete software testing once a week. The idea is to run through as many verification test cases as possible and document the defects. Ensuring that all the requirements are implemented correctly is one part of it. User interactions with the software product are always a big unknown. You don’t know what sorts of things the end-users will actually try and do and what sort of emergent defects will arise. Before running through the weekly test cases, it’s a good idea to have structured, ad-hoc testing called session-based testing.
How to perform session-based testing
Session-based testing is a form of ad-hoc testing. It allows users or testers to explore the functionality of the software product at their own pace and under their own direction with the intent to look for things that are wrong or unclear. With pure ad-hoc testing the users or testers are told to start interacting with the software product and try to break it. In session-based testing we take the functionality of the software product and break it into charters. Each charter corresponds to one or more functional blocks of the software product from the users’ perspective. Let’s say that we have a software product that allows users to enter patient information. In the charter for patient information, the tester would explore entering data, editing data, deleting data, entering incorrect data, and other things to discover any errors and unclear functionality.
A session will last about 45 minutes to an hour. During testing time the tester will receive
- charter
- datasheet to document their name, the date of the testing, and their observations during testing
- access to the software product
- training on the software’s functionality (if needed)
- instructions to write down anything observations they find during testing
During the testing session the tester will focus solely on the testing activities. The tester will not answer email and should be in a place where they will not be disturbed. After about 30 or 45 minutes of testing, the tester should be interviewed about their observations. QA will use the results of the interview and the datasheet to generate feedback to the design team. The feedback could be defects, enhancements, new features, etc.
The best session-based testers are a diverse group of people with varying ages, gender-identifications, races, and ethnicities.
Session-based testing should happen before QA runs through all the test cases for that software build. If the test plan states that the weekly software build will be on Thursday evening, then Friday morning the session-based testers should be ready; one for each charter that’s being tested on that build. After the session-based testers have finished their charters and been interviewed, QA may execute the test cases.
Session-based testing is more effective the earlier it’s implemented in the development life-cycle. Depending on the size of the software product and the expertise of the software developers, session-based testing becomes less effective in finding new and unusual defects after it’s been implemented once a week for a few months.
If you want to talk about ways to make your testing more effective, contact me. or visit Contact Us Now – Luova Solutions (luova-solutions.com)
