As the software development is concerned, software testing has become a very integral and crucial part of the development scheme. No one wants a buggy or error-prone software so there’s a high demand for software testing and it has become an investment in software development and in order to get maximum profit, it is necessary to utilize all the QA assets ideally. QA assets are those that are directly involved in software testing activities.
But to do that, let’s determine those QA assets
Asset #1: Manual Testers
Role of a manual tester is significant in the testing process despite having automation as there is some sort of things which can’t be achieved through automation testing like exploratory testing which can only be done manually. Also, manual testing helps to determine mistakes and problems on a provisional level, something which automation can’t be able to achieve.
Asset #2: Automation Engineers
In the automation testing cycle, test automation engineer plays the most important role. His job is to design, build, test and deploys automation result using the correct test automation technologies to satisfy the testing goals of an organization which can either be long term or short term. Automation Engineer is responsible for designing the virtue of automated testing, test cases such that maximum coverage can be achieved through minimal efforts.
Asset#3: Test Cases and Test Data
It is the most important assets of test automation as test cases provide the situations from which a functionality or feature can be verified. It provides the instruction related to the steps that define what to be done to test a system, the required data value inputs for those instructions and also brings expected result. In short, test cases describe what to be done to a system to test it.
Test data is important to make sure of the quality of software in automated testing. Test data which can be categorized as Positive and Negative test data is the data which is necessary to test a software. If the test data is not designed properly then it will become very difficult to cover all possible test scenarios which affect the quality of software.
Asset #4: Product owners and domain experts
As the modern era is based on software of demand, product owner and domain experts are no longer limited to software development but they are the voice of the customer and are responsible for documentation of user and project requirements. They have the responsibility that QA and testing teams can achieve a perspective of how a software product is expected to perform, what demands it means to meet and many such other things which help them to determine the scope of testing and test plans.
Asset #5: Testing infrastructure
It has become very necessary to pay close attention to testing infrastructure as it comprises of middleware components, test servers, mainframes, automation testing tools, licenses etc. which directly commit to efficiency of software testing, utilization and downtime management.
ROI is another pressure which has been developed due to an increase in automated software testing so QA must ensure that all these assets are being utilized optimally to provide ROI quickly and most importantly, positively.
So for achieving all this, QA teams can focus on some important actions like:
- Automation initiatives should include manual testers in the process.
- Using best practices of automation testing.s
- Using scriptless test automation and automation tools will reduce complexities in automation testing.
- Building a user or resource friendly and economical testing infrastructure by using efficient testing frameworks.
