Best Practices for Software Testing

• Quality is Never ending process and all team member(Dev & QA) is responsible for maintaining Quality.
• Reproduce the issue before verifying.
• Always Keep Acceptance criteria or Definition of Done – clear and simple.
• Communicate freely with all stake holders- using kick off call/ pre-release meeting / demo.
• Track the quality using Metrics (or data points) and share the same with all stakeholders.
• Any activity which is not a value add to customer should be eliminated.
• Plan to execute but don’t over plan ( plan only to avoid/ handle risks ).
• Enable QA members to maintain their own test environment.
• Keep the QA resources fungible/ interchangeable.
• Perform exploratory testing before planned testing.
• Define deadlines and escalate the slippage/issues/concerns at earliest.
• Never assume, always highlight the actual vs expected results differences.
• Think like a User and always test the business aspect.
• Any testing – repeatable, static, time consuming is best candidate for Automation.
• Test and development environment ideally should be isolated.
• Test planning, execution and defect life cycle to be combined as one.
• Ensure every defect reported is reproducible and well documented.
• Proper test evidence should be maintained and validated before QA sign-off.
• QA sign-off should be detailed and self-explanatory.
• Include Business readiness testing in your QA process.
• Conduct retrospective meeting to learn from the mistakes or highlight achievements.
• Always update your regression suite with functional cases post the QA cycle completion.
• QA members to be trained on regular basis with latest testing technologies and method.