Speed in marketing products is crucial for businesses in all industries. Digital technology is advancing at such a rapid pace; often, first movers have a significant advantage. With automation testing, you can stay ahead of the curve.
Quality assurance managers and QA automation services rely on automation to reduce repetitive, tedious tasks while speeding up release cycles and enhancing the quality of their products. Here are things to keep in mind about maximizing QA testing for your releases.
Test Areas with the Most Changes
You cannot test your entire product with each release, and you don’t have to—create focus areas based on what your development team worked on the most. You can automate these smaller areas in the release plan. If a feature worked in the last release, you wouldn’t need to spend resources on re-testing it.
Prioritize Fixing Bugs Related to Usage
All releases involve two types of updates—new features and bug fixes. There are various types of software bugs, but if you’re conducting a continuous testing cycle, it’s better to focus on ones related to usage. No development team wants end-users to experience issues in usability. When you know which tests to automate, it becomes easier to divide tests.
Invest in Data Management Tools
Having tools and resources for collecting and interpreting data enables organizations to complete tests more efficiently. With the right data, you can speed up the QA process.
Besides making the release cycle shorter, you can reduce costs, mitigate liabilities, and enable your developers to follow regulatory requirements better. Data management tools help you do a better job at quality assurance. Test automation service providers will have the correct data management tools to help you conduct successful QA tests.
Ensure Clear Communication in Your Team
Teams do not succeed at product releases by accident. Empower product managers, developers, QA engineers, and scrum masters by encouraging open and frequent communication across various channels. Today, there are different modes of communication available to distributed teams. You can use tools that encourage real-time interactions like video conferencing software or email, which allow for delays. You could even use a combination of various channels.
Whatever modes you choose should keep your team members on the same page so they can realign goals when necessary. Conduct short but frequent status meetings; instead of blocking off entire hours to get the entire team together, you can work on bottlenecks as they occur. Furthermore, get QA involved at the start of your release planning, so they know your release requirements and can spot discrepancies right away.
Finally, take advantage of having a distributed workforce. For example, suppose you are based in California, but your QA team is in Ireland, eight hours ahead of the U.S. West Coast. You can leverage that time difference—you can work on the product during regular office hours, then send it to your QA team for testing after hours.
Providing detailed notes will help your QA engineers pick up where you left off. If you’d like to discuss things through a call or video conference, you have several hours in the early morning and at the end of the workday that overlaps with Irish office hours. Here, you can conduct longer meetings and check-ins.
Conclusion
Automation testing is not a silver bullet—not all projects yield the ROI that managers want. Even with automation, engineers or development teams often have to deal with budget constraints and limited resources even while they are in a continuous product release environment. To maximize QA testing, you need to have a good idea of your priorities and ensure that all teams involved communicate effectively with each other.
Codoid helps companies stay ahead of the game with high-quality test automation services. We are a premier automation service provider; our team embeds testing throughout our clients’ production timelines, eliminating bottlenecks and making releases simply better. Tell us about your project; contact us today for inquiries!
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