Importance of Process in Testing

In “Importance of Process in Testing” blog, I will be taking you through why, when, how and where process is important.

I chose to write on this topic as many times we heard,

“Hey, it takes too much time to log a defect”.

“Why I need to write detailed steps in Test case?”.

“Following process is overhead and time-consuming”.

“End Product is important than Process”.

“Why should I create knowledge document?”.

And small story which every tester might be familiar with.

Group of testers, who has tested the banking application. Application has been tested in Development, Test, QA environment and then released to the Production. In testing phase, test team found 15 defects. All defects are fixed and resolved. After application went live in production,  it has found that 5 defects out of 15 are reproducible and which were unfortunately the show stopper, which leads to few million dollars of loss to the business.

Where things went wrong?

After root cause analysis,  it was found that, there were problems in code promotion from Release management team.

But, why those 5 defects were not get promoted to production. After further investigation it was found that the Status of the defects were not marked to correct Status by Tester to promote them to production environment. So, Release management team simply ignored them and not promoted to Production.

You might be thinking it is very small mistake and we can ignore it. However it has already caused million dollar loss to the business and off corse loss to the reputation of the company.

So, Point I would like to make here that “It is important to follow the process”.

Process can act as a base for Automation:

As process is nothing but sequence of actions to be performed, so we can say that process can act as a base or input to the Automation, which makes automation task easier.

Process or Product?

In software development context, I would say both Process and Product are important. From Customer perspective end product is more important. Customer is not bother about processes followed to develop a Product.

From development and testing team perspective both process and product are important.

Reasons are:

• Process streamlines the work you are doing.
• It makes future maintenance of the product easier.
• It brings consistency across the team the way everyone works.
• Following process results in better product.

Exceptions to the Process:

There are emergency situations where we might need to bypass the process. For project with tight timelines if some process is causing delays in the work we are doing, we might need to bypass that process or process step. But, before doing that we should let all project stakeholders know about it and they should be agreed on that.

Example: Suppose 2 defects are opened in testing phase. Tester know that they are fixed, from the defect conversation or comments. But defects are not assigned to tester by development. However, defect fix requires urgent testing and delivery.

Process says “Tester should not test unless and until defect is assigned to the Tester”.

What tester should do now?

We can treat this as an exceptional case, due to delivery urgency. Tester can drop email to project stakeholders and start verifying defects.

Later on tester can complete any process formalities to be done.

This is not the only way to handle the situation, but based on situation it’s way of handling will change.

Hope you like this blog. You can post your thoughts in comments section.

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