How To Enhance Your Software Testing Cycle By 80%?

The quality of software products has a direct impact on a brand`s reputation. A faulty release can have a negative impact on the business. A single software flaw in a release could have a long-term negative impact on your business. Money and profit are lost as a result of the never-ending cycle of patching and fixing. As users demand more technical support, business costs rise.

By ensuring the usability and quality of the released software product, software testing reduces risk for the enterprise. In this article, we’ll look at the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) and in what way it can help to reduce risk and increase value in every release.

The Need For Speed

There is always need for speed. Development must be completed more quickly, testing must be completed more quickly, fixes must be resolved more quickly, and deployments must be completed more quickly. After all, in competitive markets where customers expect instant revises and releases, a long software release cycle is unfavourable.

On the other hand, a software release process that is primarily concerned with speed frequently overlooks product quality.

What is the point of quick delivery if the product end-users have a poor user experience? How do businesses balance speed and quality?

The answer is straightforward: choose both. With a robust software release strategy in order, no sacrifice is required. Following software release management best practises and tracking the right release management metrics is the key to developing your software release cycle for both swiftness and quality.

Software Testing And Agile

Testing standards supporting agile methodologies and eco-systems were developed to ensure the quality of every software release. The Software Testing Life Cycle was born as a result of this.

Certain team members are not typically assigned with software testing in agile. During a work cycle, every member of the team is expected to conduct testing. Clean software builds are loaded many times per day via automated compilation and unit test execution. This is referred to as continuous integration. Testing is also performed by team members throughout the development process. Agile developers test; however, they are not testers. This is referred to as a “whole-team” approach to testing.

The Software Testing Life Cycle provides a standardised, robust, and advanced testing process that can be employed in agile development’s short, iterative cycles. It standardises the phases used in pre-release testing of software products and applications, with each phase having its own set of objectives and deliverables. Concurrent testing and programming are carried out.

Goal Of Software Testing Cycle

The main objective of the software testing life cycle is to have development teams with just-in-time feedback on the application’s quality. For two reasons, the software testing life cycle is designed to uncover defects as early as possible:

1. Increasing the efficiency of the software development life cycle by providing early feedback to developers and other stakeholders (shifting testing to the left). The developers can then address issues while the code is still fresh in their minds—and before the organisation invests significant time and resources in time-consuming testing processes.
2. To reduce the possibility of failure when the application is eventually put into production. Furthermore, when the application is in production and the business is gaining insights through A/B testing and application monitoring from the end user’s perspective, it provides valuable insight to the organisation (shifting testing to the right).

Teams can reduce test cycle time by automating the CI/CD pipeline while performing extensive continuous quality checks in parallel. As a result, testing efficiency and build quality improve, potentially leading to an agile testing approach.

Tips To Improve Your Testing Cycle By 70%

1. Testing Pyramid: A solid theoretical foundation can also assist you in achieving better results. It is in fact the first step towards ensuring a good performance. Unit, integration, performance, and user interface tests can all be identified. The Test Pyramid directs testers to include more tests to the pyramid’s lower level. The lower-level tests are generally faster than the UI tests.
2. Continuous testing: When large parts of codes are deployed for testing and testing occurs at only one point in the cycle, bottlenecks occur. This is easily resolved with continuous testing, a practise that involves running tests on a continuous basis within updated staging environments so that defects can be reported quickly and issues can be resolved more quickly. Continuous testing can only be effective if the testing environment is kept up to date. Make it a practise in your release cycle to deploy easier codes, update more frequently and to communicate with your QA team about which test cases can be executed.
3. Being Organised: This is frequently overlooked, but it is one of the most important tips for speeding up the testing process ever. Organizing your test cases may be the last thing on your mind while running a software through various test cases, but it actually saves a lot of time. It greatly simplifies the process for you.
4. Smart Test Data: The majority of automated tests generate test data using browsers. Rather than going this route, you could save time by creating data directly in the database. Database calls, in general, have been found to be quite cost and time effective. By reducing user interface interaction, the test can be run faster and more reliably.
5. Parallel Testing: Rather than running each test one after the other in a sequential order, running two or more test cases concurrently can help you finish the task much faster. There is no denying that automation allows you to test more parts of your software faster, but it can be time-consuming in most cases. Parallel testing allows for the execution of more test cases in a shorter period of time and is more efficient.
6. Cross-Platform Testing: The majority of our testing time is spent determining which devices we need to rely on. In the end, we either test on all devices or none at all. This consumes a significant amount of time when performing cross-browser testing. As a result, you must develop a proper cross browser testing strategy ahead of time to ensure the devices and browsers you will test on. This will save you a lot of time without sacrificing the quality of your cross-browser compatibility tests.
7. Right Parameters: It is just as important to judge your team’s performance on the right parameters as it is on anything else. If the team continues to focus on the wrong set of parameters, time will be wasted. Testing objectives must be clearly defined in order to proceed in the right direction. Mapping your test strategy to greater level of business goals can be difficult if the team remains focused on an unattainable set of targets. The parameters must be precise, concise, and in accordance with the requirements. Overestimation or undervaluation of goals can result in significant time waste.

Wind-up

Business users expect more value and higher quality from IT teams. Bugs, failed releases, and defects raise the stakes and lead the company to loss. To stay ahead of the competition and better meet the pace and demands of ambitious business goals, IT Managers and CIOs are turning to methodologies such as the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC). Partnering with the best QA services vendor can help in stabilizing and maintaining the Software testing cycle of your business.

Application testing tools are standardising testing across multinational corporations. With each release, they can enable and improve collaboration while lowering costs & risks.

Are you ready to use the Software Delivery Life Cycle (STLC) to speed up project delivery and improve software quality?

Get in touch with us!