By Sameer Desai
Vice President of Quality Assurance
ITShastra
Handling complexities, meeting deadlines and changing requirements in software testing is a continual challenge. Clients expect things turned 
around very quickly so they can keep their businesses afloat and up-to-date with current and future requirements. By applying simple tweaks to our day-to-day processes and operations, we can better prepare ourselves to keep up with the challenges.
The primary focus of this article is Rapid Application Testing. Based on our experiences, here are some of the successful practices to improve the speed as well as accuracy of testing and mitigating the associated risks without compromising the quality.
Visualize the invisible – Each tester has to visualize the application based on the requirements before its design or implementation can begin, and he or she must be able to think through the application and identify in the early stages any challenges to the application development.
Quick test at the developer’s desk – Test your application to ensure its functionality is operational before adding the code into the configuration management tool. Check for the requirement coverage; look for basic items such as user interfaces and other requirements that are critical to the process. Note – this task should take a maximum of 20 minutes to complete.
Keep an eagle eye on the unusual and document it – Maintain a centralized document or list and share it with the entire testing team. Ensure that it contains any unusual or exceptional scenarios you have experienced, heard of or read about that could happen while testing your application. Also, if any of your fellow testers have knowledge that is relevant, keep them available for cross-referencing. Important books, testing-related articles, magazines or white papers may also be helpful.
Defects in pattern recognition – Analyze any defect patterns the developer may miss during coding; it may depend on complexity of the requirement. Developer A might not skip all the low- to medium-complexity level defects, but most of the time he or she skips high complexity defects. Developer B might be dealing effectively with all types of requirements at the time of development. Accordingly, testers can decide their test approach to finish testing quickly. For example, if Developer B is the owner of the requirement, then the tester can initially jump to test critical scenarios first, then review and check low- and medium-complexity scenarios. On the other hand, if Developer A is the owner, then that tester has to look very carefully at the scenarios with low- to high-complexities.
Keep the back-up ready – In Rapid Application Development, it is very important to be in sync
with the requirements and keep up with the changes in those requirements. Simultaneously, be prepared for worst case scenarios and keep the back-up resource ready. Have quick meetings with the owner of the project and the back-up resource every three days and discuss the updates.
Be ready with test case templates – Maintain the test case templates for common fields, i.e, write down the test cases (with test data) for a field accepting email ID, currency etc. Add these “test cases” under the Coding or Unit Testing Standards document which has to be taken care by the actual developer at the coding level itself.
Use mobile devices or scanners – It is not always mandatory to go with the conventional test script or test scenario formats. If the requirements are in text form, and you analyzed that the flow diagram or state diagram is possible for the requirement, use it. It is recommended that the diagram be explained to the whole team in a common meeting or take a photo on your mobile device so that it can be shared. Use the photo file as a basis for a test script. Another option is to draw a diagram and scan it. Treat the scanned file as a test script to make your work more effective with less time.
Omit unused feature(s) – Identify the feature(s) that are currently unused by the client because maintaining unused features is overhead to the testing team. Conversely, if there are unused features that may be of benefit, you need to take advantage of them; if not, remove them from the environment.
Ask the right questions – Accept that your project will need to be completed sooner than anticipated. Faster is always better. Develop a habit of asking the right questions at right time to the system developer as well as the team members on the project. Immediately share the answers you receive with everyone to avoid repetitive questions. Also – maintain a questions and answers list at a centralized location.
Review your performance daily – At the end of the day, consider:
a) Which important problem has been identified and reported?
b) What mistakes were made?
c) What is the preventive action?
d) What new things were learned today?
Answer these questions so that future mistakes can be avoided. Also – don’t forget to include the answers in your list.
These points will help improve Rapid Application Testing. The core point is communication among all the team members is absolutely paramount. It will always play a vital role in delivering a quality product in Rapid Application Development and Testing methodologies. Challenges will be many…but keep sharing the information and your testing process will go much more smoothly!
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