improve quality

1 Comment

1. Thanh Huynh

   July 7, 2017 at 12:34 pm

   Hi Hugo,

   You are asking a million-dollar question and I find a hard time to figure out how much I should charge you to help you solve such problem :D. Anyway, here are some of my ideas for you to think about or try out:

   “How do we improve the quality of testing?”, first things first, what do you mean by “quality”? Heck, you can’t improve things you don’t know…but finding the definition of quality is not that easy. If you take this question “what is quality to you” and ask your PM, clients, peers, testers, developers, don’t be surprised if 1) they don’t know how to tell you or 2) their answers are not the same…and it’s ok too. What I’m trying to say is that people have different ideas about the quality, if you want to improve it, you need to at least have idea what quality you guys get consensus on and start from there.

   “You cannot satisfy someone if you don’t know what the expectation is”

   Now, go back to your question of “how we do improve the quality of testing” and your team is meeting some critical bugs, since I dont know your situation, I would interpret the question as “what would we do so that testers can find those critical bugs before customer find them” or “what would we do to prevent those bugs from being introduced in the system…in the first place”. Here are some ideas for you:

   1) Ask 5-why questions regarding your missed bugs. Why testers missed bugs?…Testers will answer something…You will ask why that “something” happened….Testers will answer something…Keep asking until you find the root cause of the problem (and more often the root cause is the flaw testing process you guys are following).

   2) Make sure testers are given enough time to test. In many cases, testers are put in the situation where they don’t have enough time or put under pressure to *finish up* testing. As human, when people are in hurry, they make mistakes. Make sure testers have enough time to test. Discuss with your testers about that.

   3) Make sure you prioritize your tests. The most critical features are well tested and handled by your best testers. If you do this job well, what you may end up is there are still defect leaked to customer but they are trivial ones that customer may not care to fix them.

   4) Understand requirements. Make sure your team understand the requirements and make sure they are testable. If they are unclear, just clarify them and make sure they are testable. Again, make sure critical requirements are well tested. Understanding requirements also help you define what your testing scope is. If the missed defect is out of your testing scope, it’s not your problem.

   5) Test more test frequently. The more testing you do, the better it is and the sooner you do the testing, the better it is. If you are doing long term project, you can consider continuous testing and automation testing so that you can cover more repeated testing that you can free testers from repeated tests and that testers can have more time for exploratory testing.

   6) Educate your stakeholders about the testing. Trust me, there are many misconceptions about testing from managers. They have no ideas what testing is. They consider testing is trivial activity but test team needs to be accountable for product quality. How funny it is. Of course, you don’t have to train them to become another tester (needless to say managers are hard to be trained :D), just share with manager what you testing is doing and why you do that.

   7) Involve other teams to improve the quality. Quality is built-in and byproduct of team’s work, not just test team. The whole point is to prevent such bugs are being introduced in the code the first place. What practices or process your developers are following? Did they do unit testing? Did they do code review/pair programming, etc. In other word, this question should be asked “what we can do to prevent this problem as a team?”

   I think you have enough ideas for you to try out. Remember that improving quality takes time but if you put your effort in, you will benefit from it later.

   Hope it helps.