When organizing Software QA Testing work in any Agile framework (Scrum, Kanban or XP) well-known causes of poor results and low quality of software products are delays on tasks within sprints, completeness of vision and weak communications among team members (Dev & QA).
This article is intended for companies unhappy with their Software QA results and wants to expand their QA team or create a new one through an outsourcing partner.
When Dev & QA team members are tuned, Software QA Testing guys manage delays from the development side that can compromise your software product.
Request for the “How to” in these QA areas and get sure you are going to hire the right QA firm to get the job done.
1- Team building and scope of testing. Interview the QA Tech Lead of your next team to know how he/she will:
- Assess the software products you are going to share. The workflow has to be explicit about the collaboration between Tech leads (QA and Development) and their teams, interpretation of user stories and its acceptance tests, and finally the agreed definition of “done” for tasks.
- Build the QA Plan for the project. A key point is to verify the inventory of Test Matrix and Test Cases that the QA team has as a bottom line for testing.
- Adopt changes in a sprint to reach the agreed coverage of tests (Regression, Smoke, Data-Driven, and Performance) according to specific customer needs.
- Analyze the path to QA Automation.
2- Good use of automation in daily standups. When using an SDLC tool (Software Development Life Cycle tool, i.e. JIRA, Scrumwise) the QA members of the team are in charge of:
- Standardize the reporting of bugs and issues: Goals are legibility, ease of understanding and completeness of descriptions to facilitate the replication tasks to be made by developers.
- Collaborate with developers in the understanding of user stories, acceptance tests, and indicate corrections if necessary.
- Negotiate with the rest of the team to organize the QA tickets on the board.
3- Software QA Testing practices. These ones work for us at Teravision and we strongly recommend it to be included in your projects.
- Recommended team composition:
- Web frontend or CMS: At least 1 dedicated QA analyst per 4 developers
- Mobile or Backend: At least 1 dedicated QA analyst per 2 developers.
- Do partial deliveries once every two days prior to the end of developers’ delivery. By doing this you are getting better quality in these ways:
- Increase the awareness of workflow among developers and testers. minimizing the dead time of Software QA Testing analysts and maximizing the scope (more tests in the same period of time).
- Early detection minimizes the probability of carrying forward bugs into the next sprints.
- The user stories interpretation made by developers is reviewed more times within sprints, making them better at understanding requirements.
- Define a regression testing strategy highly focused on re-test recently developed functionalities.
- When short of time, prefer selective regression tests over core features to ensure the highest quality within the available time.
- Work on adopting QA Automation to get full coverage of test matrix and test cases, and to reduce time and resources on applications to be maintained for a long period of time.
- We at Teravision use all relevant automation technologies like Selenium, Java and Javascript frameworks with the practice of the Page-Object-Model using Nightwatch.
- Do smoke testing after the regression test. If regression passes ok, the QA team can spend only 2-4 extra hours to provide a high-level assessment of the quality of a build and making a go/rollback decision.
Do you want to assembly and tune-up a Software QA Testing Team?
Contact us. We can manually test Applications for you (Test Matrix and Test Cases, Smoke, Regression) and do QA Automation integrated into the Agile Software Development process to test a wide range of development technologies: APIs, Webs and Mobile iOS/Android, Java, AngularJS, Node.js, Vue.js, React, Javascript, React Native, Bootstrap, WordPress, Drupal, WooCommerce, Magento, and HTML5 and CSS3.
