QA Testing Best Practices: A Guide for Software QA Professionals

Every company is different—different hierarchies, different roles, and different responsibilities. Of course, there are the traditional roles of QA manager, IT manager, test manager, and release manager. These roles tend to be clearly defined by the organization in an official capacity.

To ensure success, make sure you, as a QA manager , and your team understand every role and expectation. Of course, no two teams are alike with regard to structure, organizational needs, and team size. Testers, for example, can encompass a variety of roles: technology, business domain, various testing types, and expertise.

QA managers face a growing cascade of obstacles and challenges in an evolving environment. QA managers face expectations to provide solutions within a market landscape that changes constantly. Executives expect QA managers to do more with less. QA managers can get the most out of the QA process from the start by focusing on teams/roles and requirements.

“Every end user has their own point of view, and it’s important to involve end users throughout the project from the very beginning.”

An end user has the final word. They’re the person who will actually use the product out in the wild. Their input affects developers, installers, and servicers of the product. The “end” in end user refers to the fact that they stand at the end of a chain of interconnected product components. Every end user has their own point of view, and it’s important to involve end users throughout the project from the very beginning.

The role of the end user as the primary software tester goes beyond testing and reporting issues. The user works with everyone in the team in order to improve and build quality into the product. When an end user gets more responsibility, they feel more engaged. And engaged testers improve QA. You can increase tester involvement through several tactics:

• Feature request: Allow your testers the opportunity to contribute their ideas on how the product could be improved. A feature request provides QA insight into customer requirements and can help with product planning. Although most features will be too difficult to add to a product at the beta stage, if an overwhelming number of testers are asking for the same feature, it may be worth considering its inclusion in the final version of the product.
• Reviews: Allow testers to share their enthusiasm for the product. Provide a short form at the test’s end to provide freestyle feedback. This lets your users know you care.
• Assigned tasks: Assigning specific tasks to testers enhances the test by focusing the product interaction. Assigned tasks empower testers to isolate nasty bugs or issues and provide structure and guidance.

Requirements

To ensure the top level of QA for your project, you need a way of knowing if you’re traveling in the right direction. You must have the right tool that helps define requirements and risks vital to the project—a tool that allows the team to navigate the testing project from beginning to end.

Tools like TestMonitor empower QA teams to easily deal with large amounts of requirements and risks by organizing them into groups. Users classify requirements into different types and can easily prioritize risks.

By assigning one or multiple requirements or risks to test cases, QA managers can adjust relationships automatically to connect to test runs, test results, and issues.

With the right QA tool, you’ll be equipped to interview end users and stakeholders in order to discover their expectations which will inform the analysis of documentation or design plans. You can then incorporate the data you get from interviews into an actionable requirements document.

As a result, requirements will be clear and concise, detailed, with the proper scope, quantifiable, testable, and traceable. To ensure the peak level of QA success, requirements documents should be reviewed periodically by end users and customers to ensure the requirements continue to meet the customers’ needs.