Since the start of software development, we have always had to test our software. And over the course of several decades, the discipline of software testing has seen many best practices and patterns developed. Unfortunately however, not all practices have been good and there are also anti-patterns in software testing.
Your team has some test data. Let’s say you loaded in a backup form production a few months ago. Your QA specialists are familiar with the data, but your software developers hate it. They keep telling you, “It is not the right data,” or, “It is not very useful for testing.” You let them write and automate some tests, but it is not enough.
Good test data management is one of the best practices of successful software quality assurance, especially when you perform integration and functional testing for large systems. In this article, Christian Meléndez discusses important topics associated to test data management like how much data do you really need, how to deal with data privacy concerns, test data as self-service and test data generation.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining wide acceptance in the software development world, the question is open on how you should apply software testing practices to this type of software. Based on a true story, Anna Royzman explains that you need to carefully design your test strategy… and not only for AI software.
With the rapid implementation of Agile development in most IT environments, the traditional roles of functional QA managers are changing. Testing is now the responsibility by the product team; day-to-day testing tasks and accountabilities are largely owned by the product team and defect status is discussed on a quick daily meeting. But yet all of the testing personnel report into the QA Manager from an organizational viewpoint.
Test management is an essential activity for software testing. The software development teams need to have a central repository to store the test plans, test cases and test results that will provide input for the bug tracking system. In this article, Scott Sherwood presents TestLodge, a test management tool that allows you to manage your test plans, test cases and test runs with ease.
There is a value in writing tests and there is also a cost. The currency is time. The trade-offs are difficult to evaluate in software testing because cost and value are often seen by different people. The writer of the test bears much of the short term cost while long term benefits and cost are borne by the rest of the team.
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