Our Software Testing Philosophy behind our QA Services

Our Software Testing Philosophy

We need to be a transparent company with our clients; that is why this article talks about our software testing philosophy behind our software testing service, which inspires us and, at the same time, allows us to integrate with our partners.
You must consider the following question: What are you looking for when hiring a company that offers these services? Do you have the answer? Then we are ready.
This small space will shine a light on the quality, impact, and purpose of software testing for us.

Quality

• • Your experiences limit your definition of quality. Therefore Quality is subjective.
  • The quality of a product is everyone’s responsibility. While software testing can gain information about the quality of a product, the whole team must be responsible for seeing quality through from the very beginning.
  • Your audience’s’ emotions, level of knowledge within the scope of what is being evaluated, and the expectations for such a scope can greatly impact what is perceived as good quality. Therefore all 3 points in its evaluation of the quality of a product must be considered.
  • The perception of good quality will be established by what the majority deems good quality. Therefore, the following must be carefully considered:

Questions

1. 1. What are the needs of the majority, and what is important to them?
   2. How does a similar product utilized by the targeted audience compare to the developed product?
   3. If something is important to you, does it mean it is important to the majority?

Impact

• With the passing of every day, software continues to integrate more within people’s lives. Therefore, the importance of software quality is growing at the same rate, becoming ever more complex.
• The software must solve the problems of the consumers. Otherwise, it has no worth.
• As people are increasingly immersed in software, providing software that connects them rather than segregates them is even more important.

Purpose

• The purpose of software testing is not solely to find bugs.
• Also, the purpose of software testing is to gain knowledge that will help companies make the best decisions to deliver the best quality within the scope of the business.
• The purpose of software testers is to advocate for good quality within the team and stakeholders.

Approach

• • Testing is an intellectual process that requires critical, logical, and lateral thinking. Therefore, anything that discourages such thinking while performing such tests can be harmful.
  • While testing, a tester must wear the hats of a detective, a scientist, and an explorer to ask the right questions that can expose the important information needed by the team and stakeholders.
  • There are no best practices, only good practices. Blindly applying the practice to a situation because it worked elsewhere may cause more harm than good. It is crucial to understand the context of any practice in which it will be used.
  • No software is ever bug-free. Therefore, it is most important to find those bugs critical to the team, the stakeholders, and the audiences.
  • There is an enumerable number of scenarios that tests may contain. Therefore one can never say that one has tested a product completely. The definition of done in testing must be carefully considered and agreed upon by the team and stakeholders
  • While all test approaches must be considered within their context, writing out fully detailed, explicitly defined test cases is often NOT the best use of a tester’s time.
    Allowing the tester to variate his/her test execution without impacting the overall goals can introduce a larger probability of finding the most important bugs.

Results

Conventional software testing metrics are often misleading and can lead to undesired decisions. However, they’re what we have to work with now, so until something better comes along, we need to use them to approximate the information we need. We just need to use them wisely and be conscious of their impacts and risks.

Here we have some questions which we believe you may want to ask while measuring software testing within your company:

1. 1. Are your testers finding the most important bugs?
   2. Is your team more aware and considerate of the quality of your product?
   3. Are our teams and stakeholders provided with precise, clear, and needed information to help them make the best decisions about the product?
   4. What is the ratio between actual and planned costs within your software testing?
   5. As time progresses, are the testers more aware of what to test first, how to test it and why?
   6. What is the ratio between the actual time taken vs. planned time within your software testing?
   7. As a team, are you meeting the needs of most of your audience?
      
   8. Is the percentage of bugs marked as ‘won’t do’ reducing?
   9. As a team, are you producing less critical bugs in production?

Do any of the above questions or other metrics you put in place make sense within your context?

• • The number of bugs reported is not as important as those that are important to the team, stakeholders, and audiences.
  • Exploratory testing can be documented and reported on with the use of session-based testing.
    
  • Testing is about providing information to the team and stakeholders. If testing is failing to provide the needed information, it fails at its primary goal.
  • To provide the information needed, test reporting needs to tell three stories: the story of the product’s quality, the story of the testing done and not done, and the story of the testing quality, which tells why it was done or why it was not sufficient.

Communication is the key!

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Author: Alex Dillon
CEO of TechAID
Twitter: @masterpiece91