Quality Assurance – When you Don’t have time?

Everyone who works around the Software Development life cycle knows that testing is an important part of the process and it’s not an optional phase, but despite its importance, There are many cases where there is no time for testing or time is limited and it happens in different domains especially the dynamic ones, it doesn’t happen only because the lack of awareness of testing impotence, it doesn’t matter whether you are in a start-up company or fortune 500 company you might be involved in this situation for different reasons.

 

So the question here is, Should we Skip the Testing phase of the Software Development life cycle so we can go along the time frame, So we can deliver earlier?! “YES” you can do so, but you might lose a lot in terms of money, customers, and data, Instead, there are different easy approaches that are time and budget-friendly you can go through.

 

If you are in a situation where you are given a task to test the application within a stipulated time then here is the approach you should take

The first approach :

1. First list out all the high-level scenarios or major user flow of the application.
2. Then rank the scenarios by their criticality, and ask a question if this scenario doesn’t work then how much impact it will make for the user e.g. will lose customer data? Will, we make any irreversible change to the customer e.g. payment processing, ” All scenarios that impact the client or client data loss can be flagged as priority 1 or high-risk scenarios“
3.  Make sure you execute these scenarios first and if it’s not finished then your testing is not finished
4.  for the priority 2 & 3 scenarios, you can document that as an acceptable risk and the release management team can make a decision based on the risk-reward formula

The second approach :

To put all the team members, regardless of their job profile, to test the application for a day with the sole purpose to identify defects in the system, You can name it a bug hunting day or smashathon or any other fancy name that the team will be excited to join, This way with the concentrated effort within a short period of time you can find out the defects that ideally takes a long time if you go by sequencing test scripts

 

Here are some tips that would help you collect based on some testers’ answers:

1. Test at least for every page is loading or not.
2. check the basic purpose for actual the system is built. Suppose we have built the system for bidding purposes so will check if  Applicant is able to Bid or not.
3. check the functionality which will be newly introduced or any other bug fixes for that whole area (Its Impact as well) If possible
4. Create Adhoc testing, it’s nothing but unstructured testing has No documentation, No Test Design, No test cases, it’s about performing random testing without any plan.

The aim of these ideas is not to fully test the app, instead, you can make sure that there is no Showstoppers, The main functionalities as working well, at least all pages are opening, all these ideas and techniques are based on different testers experience where they have been in this situation before.