Effective Software QA Best Practices

I. Understand Business Goals and Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance Criteria should be clarified before the development starts.

Acceptance Criteria will help the team to understand if a feature meets the business requirement or not.

The team should understand what should be done, who is the target audience/feature consumer, and how they will use the system.

These will also help the QA Team to create more detailed testing documents for the clients and stakeholders.

II. Implementation of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment

This allows better code quality because of the consistent code checking of the automated CI system which is performed as part of the merge and build process.

Unit tests, end to end tests, and code coverage reports can be run automatically to ensure all tests pass and code coverage does not slip.

Early error detection since build failures are immediately identified after the code is merged.

III. Dedicate Testing Environments for Stakeholders

Development Environment – Used by the developers. In practice, this environment consists of the developers’ machine themselves. They use this environment to –hopefully- unit test their code before being delivered to the next stage.

QA/Testing Environment – This environment is used by Testers, Quality Assurance Engineers, and other testing professionals to perform many forms of functional and non-functional testing.

Staging Environment – This is essentially a copy of the production environment. It’s meant to be as close as possible to production, so the team can verify if the application will behave correctly after its deployment.

IV. Keep Testing Documentation Updated

Test Plan – prepared at the beginning and shared with the client. This document should contain all types of testing that will be used during the product development with a described purpose of each type. It is also indicated in the document what browsers, devices, etc. will be used for testing. This will also contain information about the planned testing activities by dates following the project development and release timeline.

Test Cases – this gives the project some kind of tree trunk that the team can use to imagine scenarios and further add branches to the trunk when developing additional scenarios.

Release Notes – this is the document prepared for clients that contains actual information about the project. This includes the completed features and/or known issue in a particular sprint. This gives transparency to the clients about the development progress.

V. Testing is a Team Effort

Keep everyone in the loop from the beginning to save enormous amount of time down the line.

A good bug report can save time by avoiding miscommunication or the need for additional communication.

Just as Devs expect detailed and well-written bug reports, so too should Testers expect detailed and well-written issue resolutions. Clear resolutions facilitate better retesting.

VI. Generate and Share Test Execution Status Report

This is sent out to establish transparency to the QA Team’s activities.

This will include the verified, reported and rejected issues during the verification of tickets and the testcase run information during regression testing.

VII. Keep on Learning

Continually learning enables you to foster innovation and be a catalyst for team growth.

Information technology changes fast, and none of us knows what our future holds. It’s hard to keep up with new programming languages, patterns, tools, frameworks, design techniques, and practices. If you’re a programmer who doesn’t keep her skills up to date, you won’t get the best job opportunities—in fact, you might not get any. Yet, we observe many people who call themselves testers or quality assurance professionals but don’t make much effort to learn new things.

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