Software is essential to driving successful digital transformation outcomes. For any brand or organization, the first point of contact with any customer is an online application or platform. Hence, it becomes very important for technological leaders to achieve quality and speed in software development.

New software development methods like Agile, Lightweight methodology, adaptive software development, extreme programming, and more won’t necessarily deliver the outcomes intended. This requires the strategic evolution of the software testing lifecycle in any organization across people, processes, and technologies.

Introduction: What is a Software Testing Lifecycle

Stages of Software Testing Lifecycle

What is the purpose of the Software Testing Lifecycle?

The Importance of Continuous Integration in the Software Testing Lifecycle

Defect Management Process in the Software Testing Lifecycle

Best Practices for Successful Implementation of a Software Testing Cycle

The Future of Software Testing

Conclusion

Introduction: What is a Software Testing Lifecycle

Software Testing Lifecycle can be defined as the sequence of steps carried out as part of the software development process to test each and every feature of the application. In the Software testing lifecycle process, each testing is carried out in a specific way to understand how the functions are running, how the application is behaving under particular traffic and stress, how robust is application security, and how users are interacting with the application.

The software testing lifecycle is a continuously evolving process. With all the new technologies making their way into our day-to-day lives, the software testing lifecycle is getting automated to reduce the turnaround time and catch up with the development lifecycle.

Stages of Software Testing Lifecycle

Software testing is an integrated part of the development lifecycle and comprises six fundamental stages:

Requirements Analysis – In this phase, which is also referred to as Requirements Gathering, the testing or QA team gathers testing specifications for the application under testing. These requirements or specifications help testing teams in deciding and building the right testing strategies to test specific or overall functionalities, identify current and potential security glitches, and test the application under specific workloads and stress.

A perfect requirement analysis sets the stage for the success of the software testing process. At Enhops, we have a solid Requirement Ambiguity Analysis process that helps us eliminate more than 40 percent of the software errors in the first phase. This makes the test automation phase much easier and smoother. If you wish to know, how we conduct thorough requirement analysis, email us at info@enhops.com.

Test Planning – In the test planning stages, QA teams/engineers prepare a detailed testing plan that covers various aspects like technology involved in the application under test, tools that are going to be used, testing environment specifications, testing strategies, and automation scope. The test plan also gives insights into how the testing team would be structured and function.

At Enhops, we prefer in giving detailed insights about various models used for software testing depending on the client’s requirements and teams.  Our specializations includes new-age testing methods like Agile Testing, Pair Programming, Test Automation, BDD, and TDD. .

Test Case Development – Once the test plan document is ready and approved, testing teams, work on developing test cases. This phase is called test case development. A test case is a set of actions performed on an application or system under test to check whether all functions and features are working as required. Testing teams develop test cases to check each and every functionality of the system or application. While developing test cases, QA teams need to take care of a few things:

• Develop test cases with business scenarios in mind rather than just testing the functionality of the test case. For example, if you are testing the login feature of an application, check all the possible login combinations, and if the application can be logged in using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, OTP, and more. Developing a test case that would just test the email and password login would determine to fail at the later stages.
• Prepare test data that replicates production or live environment data.
• Align test cases as per the automation testing strategy and requirement traceability matrix to ensure maximum coverage.

Test Environment Set-Up – Test environment set-up is configuring the software and hardware that mimics the live environment where users interact with the application. For configuring the test environment, multiple teams and people are involved like system admins, testing engineers, product owners, and business analysts. It is important to mention test environment specifications in the test strategy document too.

At Enhops, as part of the test environment setup, we set up comprehensive testing labs that include system and applications, test data, pre-production and production servers, front-end environments, multiple devices and set-up for localization testing, operating systems, browsers, networks, and hardware. We build mini playbooks for client teams that includes reference documents, configuration guides, IaC processes, user manuals, and tutorials.

Test Execution – As the name suggests, the test execution phase involves test script writing, running, maintenance, and bug reporting. When bugs are reported, they are routed back to the development teams for rectification. Test execution can be done manually or tests can be automated based on their frequency and importance. Usually, taking the test automation pyramid is highly recommended.

Test Cycle Closure – This phase involves completing of the test cycle and reporting the results. The testing team collects the reports and analyzes completion metrics and test results. The testing team further identifies areas of improvement for the next cycle. At Enhops, our test cycle closure phase is about finding chances for continuous improvement and co-innovating AI-ML solutions that can help in removing redundant and manual tasks as much as possible.

What is the purpose of the Software Testing Lifecycle?

As explained above, software testing involves all the steps to test the software and its functionalities and check if they are running as intended. This ensures that all stakeholders including product owners, business teams, developers, and testers are on-boarded with the software quality. The goal is to provide an exceptional user experience by eliminating bugs before they reach the hands of users.

In 2015, the Royal Bank of Scotland couldn’t process about 600,000 payments and was fined 66 million pounds. The reason was an unidentified bug. In another incident, during the mid-2000s Toyota cars were found accelerating without pedals. After investigations, it was found that there was a problem with software installed in cars –Memory corruption, wrong memory handling, disabling safety systems, systems with single points of failure, and thousands of global variables. Toyota’s stock prices decreased by 20% in a month and they had to recall millions of vehicles. Hence, software testing is important to ensure that all functionalities and features are working as required and are not posing any critical threats to users and businesses.

Here are some reasons why Software Testing must be part of every software development –

Early identification of defects – With software development getting faster and more complicated, there are chances of some defects going unidentified. Software testing makes sure that these defects are caught at early stages so that the effects are mild and manageable. This also reduces the cost of errors in terms of loss of revenues, customer churn rate, lost business, and increased development timelines.

Improves product quality – The democratization of technologies has made everything possible and hence the barriers to entry are becoming less. The only way a company can stand out among the competition is by providing exceptional quality products to the customers. Continuous testing and test automation help in improving quality by running tests on a frequent basis leaving no room for human interference and guesswork.

Enhances customer experience – With more customer touch points and ever complicated customer journey that starts with mobile and ends on a tablet, seamless and unified customer experience is paramount. Software testing plays a major role in achieving this by ensuring all new features, updates, and enhancements give users the same experience by posing any challenges in their journey.

Detects security flaws – Cybersecurity threats are getting sophisticated, one error and development teams can invite major cyber threats like malware, phishing attacks, SQL Injections, or password attacks. A continuous and automated way of testing ensures that all cyber security tests are run without fail and application releases are uncompromised. Often, the weakest links in cyber security are humans. Using automated software testing, security glitches can be detected early which helps in preventing any major security breaches.

Release readiness – This is true that testing can add up to release timelines but there’s another way to see it – Software Testing enables release readiness to keep everyone on the same page and enable smoother software releases. With testing as an extension of the software development process, the overall process of developing and deploying gets easier. Teams are always prepared to release software with better collaboration and coordination.

Ensures scalability – While the functional software testing processes ensure that the application work as intended, non-functional software testing makes sure that applications are scalable as per the increasing user traffic, increasing data volume, and transactions. With sophisticated AI-ML testing tools, it is possible to pinpoint the reasons behind application flaws and how they can be resolved based on prior experience.

Better team productivity – Though I kept it last on the list, I can’t stress enough the fact that automation contributes to team productivity. As per a new study, 83% of software developers suffer from workplace burnout. The top cited reasons are high workload, inefficient processes, and unclear goals and targets. Continuous talks about maintaining quality with the speed further add up to the burden and decreases the overall productivity of the teams. Continuous software testing helps in ensuring that developers and testers focus on adding value rather than investing time in mundane tasks.

The Importance of Continuous Integration in the Software Testing Lifecycle

In a typical manual software development process, every time a developer changes a code to add a new feature or resolve an issue, the process of code merging and managing workflows has to be manual. But this takes a lot of time and delays the release process.

In order to maintain both quality and speed, teams are now adopting test automation practices. This helps in pushing the changes to the source code automatically making everyone’s lives easier. This is where continuous integration helps.

By definition, Continuous Integration is a process that is set up using CI tools to automate the code changes process whenever new software is built, new changes are deployed, or during automated testing. At a high level, continuous integration environments mimic the actual environment and keep the code changes assembled with the source code to make the deployments hassle-free and easy.

Continuous integration systems are important for building strong continuous and automated software testing processes. It helps in testing lots of time and effort in the software testing lifecycle and ensures healthy software development. Summing up the importance of CI in the Software Testing Lifecycle –

• Faster and automated feedback loops
• Quality is integrated at each step because of repetitive and best-practices-oriented process
• More time for preparing better test cases, exploratory testing, and finding ways for creating advanced testing solutions
• Achieve better test coverage through automation

Defect Management Process in the Software Testing Lifecycle

A defect can be termed as an error or deviation from the actual workflow (which was intended while developing the application). A defect can be functional (like not being able to upload images or documents in a certain format or not being able to click on CTA) or non-functional (page loading issues, jumping from one section to another in the page).

Both functional and non-functional defects are the result of code errors. Testing or QA teams identify these errors and alert developer’s so that they can be rectified at the early stages of the development lifecycle.

Note – A defect in software testing refers to a faulty process while testing the application. This means the testing process is not adhering to testing the application performance as per business requirements of end-user experience. While defects in software imply code errors resulting in functional and non-functional glitches in the application.

A defect management process is a systematic process to identify and fix bugs. Ideally, a defect management cycle should be automated and well-documented. The defect management cycle consists of the following stages – 1). Defect Identification, 2). Defect Categorization, 3). Defect Resolution, 4). Verification by testers, 5) Defect Closure, and 6). Defect Reporting.

• Defect identification involves identifying or catching defects and start creating a repository of the same.
• Defect categorization involves categorizing defects and prioritizing them based on the criticalness of issues. This stage also involves assigning issues to the developers based on their skills and schedule.
• Defect resolution involves working on defects and resolving them. Developers take this request. It is important to use project management and defect-tracking tool so that end-to-end tracking can capture metrics like Defect Resolution time, Defect Recurrence time, and others.
• Verification by Testers involves testing defects again and seeing if they are working as intended.
• Defect closure involves closing the ticket or resolution request.
• Defect reporting involves tracking and capturing defect metrics. This helps in giving a complete view of team performance and productivity.

Best Practices for Successful Implementation of a Software Testing Cycle

In today’s high-growth and fast-changing businesses across the globe, every software development team is chasing quality engineering. We believe that Quality Engineering is not a milestone but a continuous journey that has to be done over and over again to provide a seamless experience to end users. We abide by these testing best practices –

Requirements Testing Framework– Building an application involves multiple stakeholders including business users, technical architects, developers, and testers. There’s a stark difference in understanding of technicalities and customer experience for each of these stakeholders. Hence, while preparing the application document, every user updates the document from his/her perspective, leaving a lot of room for ambiguous requirements. It is important to validate these requirements from a customer experience and business goals perspective.

Requirements Ambiguity Testing or Requirement Testing Framework helps in eliminating these ambiguous requirements. This framework ensures that the requirements mentioned in the document must be clear and should explain the functional and non-functional requirements of the application. There must be consistent language usage in the document. These requirements must be testable and avoid negative terms.

Software development teams are constantly working to improve customer experience. To achieve this, they are constantly looking for building quality in the development process from day zero. To ensure, developers and testers waste less time writing test scripts and maintaining them, some organizations have taken the TDD and BDD route.

TDD or Test-Driven Development encourages code development that is meant to pass the test cases. Test cases are written before the development, if they fail, developers will write new or fresh test cases. The objective of TDD is to build quality into the application even before the actual code development starts.

BDD or Behavior Driven Development approaches testing and code development from an end-user behavior perspective. The intention is to make the user journey successful and seamless by developing applications as per their behavior.

The BDD approach is highly successful because it involves multiple stakeholders from different teams like product owners, business analysts, business users, decision-makers, developers, and testers. Behavior Driven Development allows the requirements to be defined in plain English format and provides a medium to ensure that tech teams and business teams collaborate in building a user-centric application.

Shift Left Testing

Shift Left Testing means testing from the beginning of the software development process.In practical terms, shift left intends to start testing the code as soon as it’s written. This means preliminary tests like unit tests and some parts of functional testing needed to be done by developers.

Several practices that can help in achieving the shift left testing are testing code at the developer’s end, involving testing teams right from requirements gathering, automating as much as possible using quality engineering best practices, investing in the right tools and technologies, and using static and dynamic code analysis.

Implement Exploratory and Ad-hoc Testing

Looking at the speed of software releases, using automation is a must in today’s landscape. But that won’t be enough. While manual and repetitive testing can go for automation, teams must explore ways to implement exploratory and ad-hoc testing.

Adhoc testing doesn’t require any documentation or process to be followed. This testing finds defects while freely interacting with the application. Using this form of testing, there is a high chance that testers will encounter bugs or issues faced by the end-users, and rectifying them on a priority basis can be more profitable than the other issues.

Pro Tip – If possible, implement ad-hoc testing with some of your loyal customers and business users, the results will surprise you.

Exploratory testing is all about exploring, testing, and learning the application simultaneously. Testers can choose testing strategy and plans based on their learning, knowledge, and abilities.

But exploratory testing must be tied back to business-driven outcomes to ensure that it optimizes and enhances the application in a viable way. At Enhops, we have testing experts with experience of more than 20 years who can reboot your current and traditional testing practices to cope with new business changes.

Outcome-based Testing Model

We are big fans of tying everything back to business outcomes and values. Establish an outcome-based testing model that focuses on delivering business goals like increased customer retention, an increase in 5-star reviews, better performance and scalability, faster time to value, and more.

Your testing strategy and plan should take into account these business goals and not the automation percentage or number of tests that are automated. Right from effort estimation to test case management and bug management, everything must be linked to providing customer or business value. Outcome-based testing models ensure high quality and predictability and accessing the right skills at the right time with the right pricing.

Build Quality Engineering CoE

Quality Engineering Center of Excellence is an integrated solution to achieve quality across the enterprise. It is a holistic approach that combines four crucial elements of Quality Engineering – People, Processes, Tools-Technologies, and Metrics.

Practically, it is not possible for in-house software engineering teams to build Quality Engineering Center of Excellence because it requires specialized services to cater to all the quality needs of different teams and their enterprise applications.

At Enhops, we have worked with multiple clients where we successfully launched and integrated CoE with their current development and practices. Quality Engineering CoE sets best practices across the enterprise for every team and establishes right operating processes based on the implementation methods.

The benefits that we have delivered are –

• Building lean and cross-skilled development and testing teams
• Agile Testing Processes
• 10 times faster value to the market
• 40% Reduction in manual processes
• 68% improvement in developer productivity

The Future of Software Testing

The future of software testing is going to be ever-evolving, but if we have to make predictions for another five to ten years, software testing will look and be more integrated into development. There would be the rise of software testing teams that would be cross-functional and will work alongside infra and development teams to make sure testing is not compromised anywhere in the SDLC.

AI-ML solutions will be in full swing helping testing teams to focus more on human intellect tasks. Performance testing and security testing solutions will be more sophisticated and would be able to provide deeper insights into application performance. Quality will be seen as the first function making CoEs paramount in driving the whole software development.

Conclusion

Achieving a competitive position in the ever-changing industry is now possible by providing a high-quality digital experience to customers. This puts tremendous pressure on software development teams to release high-quality digital applications, which is impossible without integrating software testing into the development lifecycle. Integrating software testing across development brings financial and brand reputation benefits to organizations translating into long-term benefits and excellent customer reviews. This makes it essential to invest time, money, and effort in building a robust testing strategy.

If your applications are posing challenges to end-users or hampering developer productivity, connect with us for a thorough assessment of your application testing process. Email us at info@enhops.com