Recently, building software products have evolved from testing the application/product at the end of the products’ development to testing at every stage of product development. Agile methodology has made quality testing thorough and more efficient by defining the product, timeline, resources used, and establishing a strategy whilst testing as the product is built.
The agile software development methodology is a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) of the project. This method helps in resolving risks at the early stages of a product and provides an optimal rate of product success.
Software quality assurance is concerned with building software products with the required quality by monitoring the software engineering process and methods used in a project.
Software Quality Assurance Plan(Test plan)
The software quality assurance plan comprises of the procedures, techniques, and tools that are employed to make sure that a product or service aligns with the requirements defined in the product requirement document. Also, before creating a test plan, its purpose should be known to track who, when, what, and how a test is been executed. Components of a good software quality assurance plan include but not limited to;
- Purpose section i.e Executive summary
- Reference section
- Problem reporting and corrective action section
- Scope of testing
- Acceptance criteria
- Tools, technologies and methodologies section
- Code control section
- Testing methodology
- Project evaluation
Moreover, when writing a test plan, acceptance criteria is documented for each feature and identifying when a test is complete (done).
Various software quality assurance activities include but not limited to;
Test Conditions Scripting: Test conditions are the constraints an analyst should follow to test an application and this scripting is done once a product’s design has been approved. It involves any piece of functionality that should be verified. A proper test condition should have an action, a condition, and the result/ output. From the snippet below, we can quantify the action as “Check that…”; the condition as “if a user….” then finally the result/output as “is directed to the applicable page”.
Example of test condition
Product Analysis: Product analysis involves the inspection of the work products and its related information to determine if the set of standard processes were followed or not.
Design Inspection: Design inspection is done by analyzing the product’s User-Interface(UI) if it conforms to the accepted design. Design inspection is vital and should be done at the initial stage of software quality analysis because it is possible the engineers skipped an aspect of a design. Feedbacks, if found, should be relayed to the engineers and adjustments should be made. Design inspection is carried out before checking a product’s functionality. With this method, all aspects of the product are correctly analyzed to ensure optimum quality.
Functional Testing: This verifies what the system does without considering how it does. This type of black-box testing thereby focused on testing the system specifications or features. It verifies how a product should work from the user perspective. All the functionalities stated will be tested to ensure quality.
Exploratory testing: This involves testing a product without having an overview of the product beforehand. It is wearing the hat of a first time user of a product, the process the user might follow. This helps in grading the user experience of a product. Exploratory testing is essential at the early stages of SDLC( Software Development Life Cycle) and helps to uncover errors quickly.
UI automation testing: This process involves writing automated scripts for a product by using an assertion tool. There are various tools available for automation testing. Examples include Test studio, Selenium, Cypress, TestComplete. Choosing a tool varies among software quality testers depending on what you want to achieve.
Cypress is a relatively new tool used for UI automation testing, it is easy to understand for software quality analyst without an elaborate background in programming. It makes an analyst to write faster, easier, and more reliable tests.
Example of automated test script using cypress
- Performance testing: This involves analyzing how a product will work on stress, load, and at what point the application breaks. There are various tools used for performance tests which include Apache jMeter, WebLoad, NeoLoad, SilkPerformer amongst others. Also, choosing a tool depends on what an analyst is trying to achieve.
Conclusion
Software quality assurance is an activity that is employed throughout the software development lifecycle. It is very important for a software product or service to succeed in the market and live up to the customer’s expectations. In agile, every member of a product is involved in ensuring quality throughout the life cycle of the product right from the requirement gathering stage.
