The field of software testing and the skills that come with it are crucial for anyone involved in tech and software development. If you’re looking forward to a fruitful career in this field, here are seven software testing practices you should do to improve your testing skills for software. Check them out.
- Test early and often
If there’s one habit you should develop as a software tester that will be valuable to you in this career, it will be the habit of testing software early and often.
By adopting this efficient approach, you can identify and address issues at the earliest stages of development. You want to avoid catching bugs wreaking havoc all over your software that you could’ve fixed in the first stages of development.
With this habit, you can catch bugs and defects before they escalate into more complex problems. With it, you can detect issues when they are easier to fix, saving valuable time and resources.
Moreover, regular testing allows you to gain a lot of hands-on experience with the software, which is a great way to gain a deeper understanding of your application’s behaviour. This experience allows you to refine your testing techniques, learn from mistakes, and develop a more comprehensive skill set.
You can learn a ton by trying out different types of tests, like unit, integration, and system tests, and become a pro at spotting defects.
Plus, testing your software often promotes a positive and collaborative environment among everyone involved. When developers, testers, and stakeholders work together, they can share their knowledge and expertise to improve the product. And catching issues early is always better than waiting until they become significant problems.
2. Write compelling test cases
Test cases would be your actions on a software’s system to check whether everything works as it should. Your quality assurance or QA team creates a test case after the development team has finished developing a particular feature or sets of them for your software.
Significant test cases aid your QA and testing team in covering all the bases when it comes time to test whether a software’s feature works.
A practical test case possesses specific qualities that contribute to its success in identifying defects and improving the overall testing process.
Firstly, a practical test case should be clear and concise. It shouldn’t contain flowery language. IT should clearly explain each end user’s step and the expected outcome.
Secondly, a good test case should be comprehensive. It should cover all possible scenarios and edge cases to ensure thorough software testing.
Furthermore, a practical test case is also specific. This specificity allows for better isolation of issues and makes it easier to pinpoint any defects or failures encountered during testing.
Also, when a test case shows excellent results, it should be repeatable. You should be able to run and execute the test case multiple times consistently. This ability helps in regression testing by ensuring that previously fixed issues do not resurface with subsequent changes or updates to the software.
Lastly, your test case should include explicit measures of success. Measurable criteria enable testers to objectively evaluate whether their steps helped them achieve the desired outcomes.
3. Use automated two-tier testing
When you’re doing software testing, you might view the software and interact with it only from the perspective of the data tier since that’s what you’re in front of often, especially as the developer. However, covering your software testing procedures from both ends is good.
Sometimes, the software seems fine from your side, but it isn’t working well from the client’s view. That’s why you should automatically be testing from both sides to ensure that you are doing a comprehensive test for your software.
4. Talk to end-users
If you’re responsible for testing a software or app you’ve already launched, then talking to your end-users is a good idea.
Given the complexity and number of features of plenty of software, functionality errors might slip right under your nose. Therefore, communicating with your end-users can be a helpful step that can lead you in the right direction to fix these errors.
Talking to them doesn’t only help with identifying errors, but they also help you determine which aspects of using your software might not be the most pleasant thing for them. It might work as intended, but how you intended it to work might not be pleasing to your end users. The only way to know that is by talking to them.
5. Ask questions
If you’re a software tester or part of the QA team, you must be comfortable asking thorough questions. For example, you can start with crafting excellent software testing interviews that will help you get into the mindset of your end users.
Developers might be defensive when they encounter many questions, but there are reasons why you should be thorough like that. The purpose of it is to get a better understanding of the software and the users you expect to be interacting with it.
6. Adopt a technical mindset
If you plan on diving deep into the world of software testing as a career, then you need to be more comfortable with the technical aspects of this line of work.
The more comfortable you are with a technical mindset, the easier you can communicate with developers. When you have clear communication, you only increase the efficiency of your software testing while ending up with great software.
7. Keep learning
When you work in the tech field, you should expect that things are moving quickly. Industry rules and concepts constantly change, so you shouldn’t be comfortable with “how things always were” if you’re in this field.
A desire to keep learning is crucial to your long-term survival and thriving in this field. Therefore, make sure that you are always open to ideas and changes.
Conclusion
These software testing skills can make you a thorough software tester so that you and your team can develop software that’s easy to use and as error-free as possible. Develop these skills yourself so that you can start to be a more efficient and responsible software tester.