Ensuring unparalleled user experiences is a must for enterprises today. There is no room for a poorly functioning app, degraded performance, bugs and glitches, and other factors that comprise the software quality. This makes it a mandate for enterprises to lay out effective testing plans and extensive roadmaps to ensure superior software quality, thereby escalating brand value and driving business revenue.
A software testing roadmap can be a robust element ensuring the right direction of the testing workflow and the outcomes it can achieve to meet the desired quality and experiences it renders. Technology leaders today need to adopt the right solutions and trends of software testing to drive the program forward with actionable goals. It is necessary that the teams build an appropriate roadmap and achieve desirable CSAT and drive revenue.
This blog compiles the critical attributes required for building a robust software testing roadmap and how HeadSpin assists companies across the globe to leverage data-driven capabilities to execute end-to-end testing.
Why is it important to strengthen a testing roadmap during the economic downturn?
As the global recession continues to sharpen, organizations worldwide are attempting to cut down on costs by reducing investments in advanced technologies and testing frameworks. However, not deploying the required tools lead to inefficient testing, reduced test coverage, compromised test results, and much more that lead to degraded software performance and user experience. Additionally, organizations are also laying off multiple employees and shutting down departments, which leads to lowered productivity and consequently causes poor app testing capabilities and inferior customer satisfaction.
As a result, adopting the right testing strategies is essential to avoid any negative brand reputation and lowered revenue generation due to poor app quality.
What should be on an enterprise’s software testing roadmap to better address the economic downturn?
The following are the primary elements that an efficient software testing roadmap should include -
1. Determining the scope
The scope and overview of the project are the primary and critical factors to be considered while building a roadmap for software testing. Any software product's overview comprises information on who should approve it, review it, and use the documents.
Simultaneously, it is essential to identify the primary objectives of the tests:
Testing teams and leaders should review the existing tests and eliminate any test that doesn't offer the desired value and doesn't assist in assessing the app quality.
The test objectives should be masked from the tests and split into different test types like end-to-end, UX/UI, functional tests, and others.
It is also crucial to identify the right strategies, frameworks, tools, and techniques to manage testing software and meet the test objectives.
2. Setting the right test environment
For enterprises, it is imperative to identify the testing environment specification and build the right environment to obtain the best test results. The key elements of a test environment include delineating the test data requirements, distinct instructions on how to produce the test data, the number of environments required, the right setup, and strategies for backup and restoration. In the domain of automated testing, one of the most critical limitations is to ensure the building and maintenance of stable test environments. Instability in the test environment can be caused by a lack of understanding of the primary components and configurations of the test environment that are usually inconsistent. While developing the software testing roadmap, technical leaders in a project must delineate and address the obstacles that compromise the stability of a test environment in order to make testing more efficient and yield desired outcomes.
3. Defining the KPIs
Once testing teams and managers derive the goals and objectives of the testing, it is essential to identify the primary and secondary KPIs that need to be monitored across the testing cycle. This helps gauge the test's success and meet the goals.
Also check: The Increasing Need for Performance Testing in Web Applications
4. Deploying the right tools
Identifying the appropriate software testing tools is a crucial aspect to be considered while developing the testing roadmap. The required approaches and tools for performance, load, stress, security and multiple other methods of testing should be well-planned. Whether the project goals align better with open source tools or commercial tools, the number of users it can support, the number of concurrent tests that can be accommodated, and several aspects must be identified to obtain desirable test outcomes and software quality.
Some of the essential tasks for selecting tools include:
- Defining the tools for test management and automation required for test execution
- Evaluating whether the product is open-source or commercial
- Defining the test approach and tools required for each type of testing
5. Risk analysis
While building a robust testing roadmap, QA teams must implement the required risk analysis processes. Teams need to identify the potential hazards linked with the project and define a proper strategy to incline these risks to ensure that risks are eliminated appropriately. In case the development team witnesses hazards in real-time, there needs to be a suitable contingency plan laid down to address and manage the risks and also identify other potential risks and a backup plan to prevent them.
6. Tracking progress
The process of measuring progress is a vital part of an efficient roadmap to automation testing. Most companies often rely on counting metrics like the percentage of automated tests required, which can lead to automating tests unnecessarily rather than implementing them wherever required. It is also efficient to leverage metrics that help assess the effect of test automation and other deployed tools. Effective testing metrics should include capabilities to:
- Decrease test cycle time
- Evaluate 'mean time to resolution' for defects
- Reduce test maintenance time
How HeadSpin helps enterprises build effective application testing software roadmap?
HeadSpin's data-driven test automation Platform helps companies perform end-to-end web and mobile app testing on multiple applications on real devices across 50+ global locations and capture critical KPIs to ensure perfect user experiences. The Platform assists product managers, SREs, developers, and QA teams seamlessly:
- Accelerate development cycles with intelligent automation
- Run performance testing to automatically surface performance and user experience issues and resolve them proactively
- Obtain AI-based testing insights for optimizing app performance
- Access and debug apps remotely
Conclusion
In the era where delivering perfect digital experiences is imperative for organizations, implementing a strong testing roadmap is crucial. This helps enterprises and their QA teams, SREs, CTOs, and developers efficiently test software quality and monitor their performance and functionalities. Laying down an effective testing roadmap is a way to continual improvement of the software testing workflows to help guarantee optimal customer satisfaction and raise the brand value and business ROI.
FAQs
Q1. What are the primary types of test strategies?
Ans: The different types of test strategies include
- Static Testing Strategy
- Static Testing Strategy
- Behavioral Testing Strategy
Q2. What is a test strategy document?
Ans: A test strategy document is a properly-defined document in software testing that distinctly defines the exact software testing approach and testing objectives of the app.
Q3. What is software quality testing?
Ans: Software quality testing is a process of measuring whether the software meets the requirements that can be either functional, like calculations, technical details, data manipulation, and others, and non-functional requirements, like recoverability, security, usability, and supportability.