The Top 4-Ways to Build the Right Test Strategy

A Test Strategy is created to guide all teams on steps to achieve software quality objectives. With software companies adopting agile practices in a big way, an effective Test Strategy becomes even more important with iterative / sprint-based application development.

A test strategy being a live document, should ideally plan to integrate the business, development, testing, and management teams, define the quality objectives for the intended application and chart-out a path on how all the teams can help achieve these.

The test owner and the team can build an effective test strategy with these 4 best-practices:

A) Focus on Prevention – Helps avoid major issues and rework on projects.

ü Prioritize requirements and business rules.

ü Communicate changes in priorities immediately and effectively to important project stakeholders.

ü Strictly review and implement common requirements that ensure a consistent product.

ü Review product designs with an architect that can help implement future requirements with ease and optimization.

B) Design the Right Metrics – To iteratively “measure quality” for the project.

ü Application go-live metrics should cover the base metrics for requirements, design components and development progress along with the test output.

ü To pick the right metric, consider ease of collecting data regularly and generating reports.

C) Make an efficient Test Design – Provides high-coverage and build a scalable test architecture for complex applications.

ü Understand, why “test design” is important. For example, having basic UI checks as part of a checklist helps to start defining and building a simple “test design”.

ü An efficient test design provides a basis to automate redundant user activities.

ü Define “test scenarios” instead of “test cases”. Reuse documented requirements and business rules to build your test scenarios.

D) Build Cross-Functional and Cross-Technical Testing Teams.

ü Build cross-functional and cross-technical testing teams. Allow and educate team members to delve deeper into the application architecture and core design to unravel design bottlenecks and limitations.

ü Testing team should interact with the business team to gather deep domain expertise to identify preventive measures.

- Written by Anand Nanavati (SupraDigit Solutions)

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