Retesting Techniques and Approaches

In an ever changing and fast paced world, things need to be done quicker. Not only to save costs but consumers need products and services at a touch of a button and assurances that they all cater for their needs first time without fail. Companies are faced with many dilemmas; costs, do a project on the cheap and risk delivering a shoddy project. Time, do it right but take too long and your market saturation will be behind your competitors. Quality, rush a project out the door and risk introducing operational and productions defects. So, is there another way?

Regression Testing and creating a robust set of reusable tests is key to addressing the old dilemma of cost, speed and quality. Providing a framework of carefully chosen tests to run on demand and ensuring existing functionality is not disturbed by newly introduced changes to the software platform is essential.

You should ensure that the following has been thought through before considering and creating your regression test plan. Firstly, select which test cases should be included into the test suite and which ones are suitable for automation. Secondly, how long each test will take to build and run as a suite of tests and finally, always look at the output of the test execution to ensure that constant refinements are made to ensure maximum optimisation. An ROI exercise is also recommended to ensure that effort involved in creating the regression test pack stacks up against your business objectives.

Adding new tests to each release cycle to the regression pack is essential to creating greater coverage and adding to the assurances of delivering software into production. There is a cost to regression testing and retesting even when set up, but this cost is negated by all the benefits it brings in reducing the time to market, the time testing takes to execute the tests and the overall cost saved by automation.

In addition, you should also consider performance testing at the end of regression testing to ensure that the system performance is not negatively affected due to changes implemented in the code base.