We are in the midst of an age, where most product development companies are trying to achieve faster time to market. There isn’t going to be any respite for this in the future, as product development lifecycles are only going to get shorter. However, shorter lifecycles pose huge challenges to the team that undertakes the entire process. However, delivering quality in such short spans of time is a major challenge.
Quality Engineering has evolved over the last decade and many new approaches, methods, and tools have emerged, that speed up the entire process. This calls for optimizing the process further to ensure a timely rollout of products. The aim is to maximize productivity by reducing time and efforts spent on repetitive tasks. This is where “Reusability” comes into a QA process.
Some of the elements of testing may remain the same across different products. Therefore, if a team builds reusable QA assets, it will reduce the testing time and preparation time to an extent. Reusable assets can be introduced at different levels of the testing phase.
Let’s take a look at some of the components in QA that are reusable in different testing phases.
Reusing Test Cases
One of the basic components that can be reused are test cases. Though new test cases have to be prepared depending upon each product, there are test cases that are common across products. These test cases can be reused, and it will help in saving time that may be otherwise used to create the same test cases from scratch.
This will help in creating libraries of test cases, and in the future will be become building blocks of test scripts for automation.
Modular Framework
When you have modular frameworks and modular code that can handle repetitive functionalities, it will be easily reusable. Generic portions of code can be reused for multiple products. This will ensure some form of uniformity in the process and across products. Code for certain common functionalities like login/log-out and others could easily be separated in a module and used whenever required.
Reusability of Test Data
Test data can be present in different formats, and they can be in multiple formats across multiple systems. Some of the aspects that can be reused are user accounts, user profiles, payment components and similar components that are common can be reused. It should be part of a common repository so that it can be accessed when needed.
Reusing standard Templates
Bug reports, test plans, test guidelines, mails for release, dashboards, etc. are items that can be reused by making minor changes. A sample set saved in the repository can avoid creating the same items from scratch again.
Reusing Test Procedure Document
The test procedure specifications document is prepared while the testing is in progress. These specifications include information such as test environment setup, procedure, and format to report accurate test results.
Reuse of Summary Report
A test summary report contains the entire summary of the test cases used for the testing procedure. It includes details such as the number of test cases executed, nature or the kind of errors reported, and data collected during the process that will be matched to the SLAs. These summary reports can be reused within the domain or at the project level.
Reusing Mails
Various emails would be sent for collecting customer feedback, beta testing, bug bashes, etc. that will have a standard template. These are common elements that can easily be recycled as these aspects remain predominately the same.
Creating reusable QA assets eventually helps in creating a reliable and dependable testing method. This will help in creating products that are consistent and uniform in quality. Apart from this, it helps in achieving a faster time to market by reducing the time for preparation and conducting the tests. Overall it is cost effective and eventually, However, to achieve this level of efficiency testing teams need to plan early and effectively by creating the right level of reusability of the testing infrastructure. Beyond planning, you also need to ensure that your team of following the procedure to take full advantage of reusability.
In order to survive in the market of digital disruptions, it becomes very important that it be implemented effectively. eInfochips is a product engineering company with over 25 years of experience in delivering quality products with the right infrastructure with CMMi and ISO certified processes. eInfochips delivers quality engineering services with reusable assets across IoT, DevOps, Cloud, and Digital among others. To know more about our quality engineering services, speak to our experts.
