Doing More with Less: Optimize Your Testing Practices

Trends in testing are important to keep top of mind for testing leaders, practitioners, and other software professionals. That's why SPR hosted a webinar talking about how these trends can used to optimize testing within organizations. Top trends include doing more with less, and topics focused on Shift Left, Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Accessibility.

Testing teams are being challenged to increase the speed and coverage of their testing while reducing expenses. In lean teams, using both human and digital resources in a strategic manner is essential to driving value while meeting overarching organizational objectives. While talking through the top four trends in testing, Yury explained what testing teams can do to accomplish more with less and remain budget conscious.

There are seven best practices you can implement in your organization using existing resources and tools. It's key to prioritize this work when you have time between projects.

Those best practices are:

1. Build and clean up your centralized team repository to ensure that your team members have a consistent understanding of your practices, processes, and approach.
2. Always take care of your regression suite and keep it organized as it grows, avoiding confusion and lost time when executing – avoiding performing regression on deprecated features and including new components and features.
3. Report on coverage so you have data on how well you’re covered with test cases allowing your team to focus their manual efforts on areas without coverage.
4. Upgrade your tools, including test case and defect tracking systems as well as automation packages, ensuring you’re on the latest and greatest versions of the tools avoiding security risks and taking advantage of the latest features.
5. Clean up your code. Include comments so all team members are working with the same context of the function or change and remove the garbage to avoid false defect reports and extra test run time.
6. Optimize execution times. Organize tests into logical groupings, that do not utilize the same test data, allowing tests to run in parallel. Perform dry runs executing tests to help your team understand where optimization points for speeding up run time durations exist. Continue to refine test group organization as tests are added.
7. Improve reporting. Create a dashboard to show testing including test planning, test case authoring and execution for both manual and automation activities. Clear reporting can help inform prioritization for QA teams with respect to where they should be spending their time as well as product owners and stakeholders with regard to work backlogs.

Keeping these best practices in mind will empower you and your organization to make informed decisions on how to prioritize your efforts and identify areas that will have the most impact on improving your testing efforts.