Why ‘testing’ might be holding back the quality of your software

Testing or Software QA, has traditionally been the last piece of the software delivery puzzle. Testing and finding bugs at the end of a release cycle was the norm.  However, fixing those defects, changing designs and redeveloping the features lead to more work done twice, more time spent on retesting and loads of regression. So, this approach meant testing held you back from your final goal of software quality assurance.

Being the last phase of the development process and mostly being stretched for time and resources, testing has been seen as a hold up for final delivery to market.

With the advent of Agile and DevOps the thought process has changed and the focus now continues to be more on software quality assurance throughout the development lifecycle. Testers today need to focus more on assuring quality than finding bugs.If testing prevents you from delivering on time and you become a bottleneck at the end of a release, you need to focus your efforts on other quality assurance activities, which may or may not be a 100% testing but are surely related to overall quality of your software.

In my article for PractiTest QA Learning Centre, I talk about how to overcome this. https://www.practitest.com/qa-learningcenter/thank-you/software-quality-assurance-bottleneck/

Training Developers how to test their code better

Reviews as checkpoints

Customer Focus Groups

Change in team’s Mindset

Tool Support

To read the complete article – Click here –>

Summary

If you feel testing is holding you back from right time deliveries and turning your team into a bottleneck at the end of the release, you need to focus your efforts more on quality assurance activities that are related to the overall quality of your software – and less on the actual execution of your tests. Hope the tips shared here will help out you and your team achieve the quality levels we dream of!

Thanks for reading!
Nishi