The great waterfall hangover is yet to pass us by.
Software development and delivery teams across the world continue to dismiss the potential of testing teams. QA personnel are involved in the development process only toward the end of a sprint, resulting in frantic debugging and the release of products that will not perform in the market as well as they potentially could. Here are a few benefits of integrating software testing early on in the software development and delivery process.
1. Identifying logical oversights
Testing is not merely a task, but an approach. A tester critically evaluates the application under test (AUT) in ways that a developer would not think about. This is because testers, over the years, learn to identify where logical errors are most likely to occur. They test the AUT for both business needs and end user expectations. You must leverage a tester’s intuition to comprehensively test the AUT.
2. Avoiding bug explosion
When you leave testing for the end of a sprint, you accumulate an entire sprint’s worth of bugs and logical inconsistencies to be found at once. A week before the release date, your testers will report 150 bugs that strongly influence ship/no-ship decisions, thereby jeopardizing your release. You will be forced to address the most critical of bugs, while letting low priority ones flow through the cracks, which ultimately affects user experience. And that is undesirable, especially in a world of fast and loud user reviews.
3. Bridging the gap between testers and evolving client expectations
No amount of documentation can completely keep track of all the changes being made to the AUT along the way, in terms of user expectations, business needs, client requirements, developers’ inputs, and more. This creates confusion among testers and hinders the effectiveness of their work as they must work with outdated documentation, and as a result changed functionalities are logged as errors.
4. Providing first user feedback
Your testers are also your first set of end users. In exploring the AUT, they examine it from an end user’s perspective and are therefore rich sources of feedback regarding whether or not the application performs the way it is expected to. Such experiential feedback helps strengthen product design and architecture, resulting in a more reliable product.
