Reflections on 20 Years of Testing: Adapting and Optimising Practices

In my testing career, I’ve witnessed significant changes over the past 20 years. However, certain constants remain: the pursuit of working smarter, managing risks efficiently, and optimising testing efforts. We strive to test faster while minimising costs to stay competitive in the market. Flexible testing tasks allow us to adapt to changing schedules.

Additionally, creating knowledge documents, conducting peer reviews, and asking critical questions contribute to effective testing. This blog will explore insights from my testing journey, emphasising three key areas: what, when, and why. The “what,” "when,” and “why” drive out what goes into the category of doing the right thing, but the three are inextricably linked, and I expand on these below.

Introduction: Exploring the Significance of Software Quality

We talk about 'quality' quite a bit in our line of work, we talk about:

• Quality assurance
• QA & Test
• Improving quality
• Ensuring quality
• The quality of the software

Introduction: The Importance of Document Review

In testing, as in development in general, we rely on good documentation to help us ensure that we deliver the right product to our end users. These documents may be user stories, requirements, technical designs or any other document that you can rely on to “build It right” and “test it right”. All should all be subject to a critical review.

However, document review is not something most testers are taught and for many, the review will consist of little more than reading the document, pointing out typos and obvious mistakes. They are not aware of the two key elements they should be looking out for which are...

Unveiling Insight: Test Analyst Interview Questions & Strategies

Aftermath of the Halloween, I thought it would be good to consider if there are any ‘tricks’ to a successful interview? Over the past few months, I've drafted a selection of interview question templates to standardise the nFocus interview process. As part of this process, the templates have been used successfully to identify quality test resource for several clients who are now part of the nFocus team. Congratulations to those now hired!

Understanding the Importance of Quality Assurance in Educational Systems

The higher education sector seems to be ever-growing with different faculties updating old student management systems to innovative new ones. Working on a project in this industry has a lot to offer and it can be really exciting to see how a system/application can evolve over different development and test phases.

As a tester of Quality Assurance in Education, this sector has the potential to expose you to many different types of testing. Here are just a few I have been party to so far:

Quality Assurance (QA)- The Role of a QA Tester

Let's talk about job titles particularly QA Test Job role! The role of a Software QA Tester (or QA Engineer) is to review and analyse new or changed software applications, products, mobile devices etc. and to look for defects or issues so that these can be resolved before a software change delivery is released for operational use.

Quality assurance QA is commonly performed within a software delivery life cycle but can also be part of process mapping and similar periodic improvement and efficiency reviews or occasionally as a one-off initiative.

How Can You Prepare for Version 2.0?

Today, we welcome back our popular guest author, Renée Elizabeth Mineart.

It has taken me a considerable amount of time to get my head around this topic. I’m not sure, even now as I place fingertips to keyboard, it is the right direction for this blog. But I think it’s an important topic to cover and is perhaps not talked about often enough. So, I ask you to please, bear with me as we broach the murky waters of … (queue dramatic music) … Project Failure. 

How to Manage Stakeholder Expectations 

It’s possible to keep your stakeholders happy, even if quality is not great, simply by managing their expectations from start to finish.

If I had to summarise this post in a few words, I’d say something like this:

1. Agree what the quality expectations are
2. Figure out what to do to make sure they are met
3. Agree how to measure whether they have been met
4. If not, let the right people know and recommend some ways to improve quality and fix the problem

Aligning Testing Strategies with Digital Transformation Goals

Unless you’ve been hibernating for the past couple of years then you’ll be fully aware that digital transformation and artificial intelligence are at the top of every IT Directors list of things to do. Companies today are facing a couple of big challenges, staying ahead and on top of new digital technologies as well as providing outstanding customer experience. To be clear, digital transformation is the process of using new or modified business models, processes and customer expectations to meet changing business and market requirements by use of new and advanced technology.

Understanding Requirement Specifications

In Scrum, quality is defined as “The ability of the completed product or deliverables to meet the Acceptance Criteria and achieve the business value expected by the customer”. 

So how can we assure quality so that delivered products meet this definition? Sometimes, testing and quality assurance are used interchangeably so just to be clear, for this blog, by quality assurance I don’t just mean testing. Testing can be part of the QA process but for now I’d like to define quality assurance as a consistent (or at least regular) set of checks that are applied throughout the application lifecycle. There are 2 main parts to it: