A new year likely means new goals, whether you want to ship features faster, boost quality or scale your team. Whatever your goals are, make sure to set your team up for success with the right QA process.
1. Take a Modular Approach to Testing
Even relatively small test suites are likely to recycle and reuse the same activity flows in multiple test cases. By using a system that allows you to create modular test cases, you’ll be able to keep your suite up-to-date and accurate with drastically less management time.
2. Implement Version Control for QA
Version control is standard practice for development, but hasn’t yet been widely adopted for QA. By using version control for software testing, your team will have better control over test cases and code quality.
3. Start Functional Testing Earlier
Don’t hold back on functional testing. Teams that start writing tests as soon as a new feature is spec’d and begin running functional tests as early as possible benefit from shorter development cycles and fewer bugs in production.
4. Integrate Your Testing Workflow with Dev Tools
Fast-moving teams know that they must de-silo QA to keep up with the demands of fast-paced development cadences. Integrating QA with other critical development tools and processes helps streamline the testing and reduces the risk of anything slipping through the cracks.
5. Rightsize Your QA Strategy to Your Quality Goals
It’s common for teams to approach QA with a “test all the things” mentality, aiming for as many test cases as possible. Bloated test suites are hard to manage and can yield unreliable results, so they don’t directly translate to better quality software.
6. Find the Right Metrics to Measure Quality
Measuring the efficacy of your QA process helps your team celebrate successes and stay on track long-term. But many teams focus on the wrong measurements and, as a result, struggle to map their testing strategy to high-level business goals.
