Choose a Software Testing Model by Weighing These 5 Factors

Factors that affect testing and value

When discussing software testing patterns and approaches, teams should first determine what will bring the most value to their products. Important factors to consider include:

• feedback speed
• accuracy of comments
• feature-level testing
• regression approaches
• amount of regression errors

Then teams can discuss Scrum, Waterfall, Kanban, and other software testing patterns to find the right match.

For example, consider a team following Scrum. The team has testers who receive a release near the end of a sprint, and they do a two-day regression burndown. In a two-week sprint timeline, the team reserves two cycles of “regression testing” at the end, which culminate in four days, or 20% of the overall sprint time.

If the team discovers bugs on this fourth day, it means that the whole sprint will be behind. The same time, programmers are probably working on the next sprint in a different branch – not just sitting around and waiting for bugs. Any bug fixes should merge in both branches, and any regression bugs they introduce won’t be caught for at least two weeks. The tester will have to write the bug, tell someone how to reproduce it, argue whether it’s a bug, argue whether it should be fixed, wait for a programmer to find the bug and possibly try to fix the bug issue. Sounds expedient and expensive, doesn’t it?

Now let’s compare the above scenario to one where a developer-tester pair working together finds a bug. the tester knows exactly who introduced the bug and can solve the problem immediately. This second example greatly shortens the testing timeline and reduces the risk of an incomplete bug fix and/or creating another regression bug. This involves much less wasted time and much less chance of the fix being incomplete or creating another regression bug.

Development teams can use a tool like Jira to analyze the data and then learn how to shorten the lead time. Once the team has this data, it becomes much easier to find the right software testing model for your organization.

Cost-effective return on various software testing models

Specification for example (SBE). This software testing model aims to limit the end-of-project arguments and rework that plague development teams trying to to fix bugs by rewriting them at the end of the process. For example, teams can estimate redesign time based on the time it takes to write a new story and multiply by the number of people involved in the process, then again by the number of stories per sprint.

To be on the safe side, assume that only 50% of these arguments will be prevented by this estimate. Likewise, the team can also estimate additional time spent on specification. This simple calculation can show that five man-hours per week could Actually to safeguard 20, which represents tit is only worth the SBE is the time saved in arguments and rewrites during this sprint. teams that refer to their documentation on what the software has to do can find this value exponentially increased.

Continuous delivery. Yes your Software components are isolated, can be deployed separately and deploycomments in the subsystem A don’t create problems in the subsystem B, the team can stop doing regression testing altogether and roll out each feature as they go‘is finished. The testing strategy for these Dusable youargets (DT) will be largely depend on the Ffeedback speed, feedback accuracy, feature-level testing, regression approaches, and amount of regression errors. API testing tools, for example, are relatively quick to write and quick to run. Automated API testing act like a kind of contract — given this entry and database condition, expect this production.

Before a deploymentis lyingan API programmer can run a simplefast check if their changes “broke” any of these expected results. On the other hand, GUI testing tools may be slow and brittle. For continuous delivery, it may make more sense to have a human walk through the interface before deploying a small component. If, however, the component is not that small, requires a lot of configuration, and needs to run on a dozen combinations of browsers and mobile devices, testing tools can save time.

Cascade. According to Roger Fergusonwho taught my graduate courses in ssoftware mmanagement, testing in Waterfall has a huge advantage. That is to say, it is a phase that you must To do only Once. In all other software testing patternstesting is an activity you Many times carry out. Referring to the example of the Scrum team with the late sprint build request, regression testing must occur every two weeks. Many teams who attempt continuous delivery try to test everything — including GUI — each time a commit is pushed into version control. In OThereafter, testing is cheap for the first release if the regression injection rate is high.

Longer Developers do without regression testing, the more unknown defects they will create. A writing team Seven new bugs for every 10 that has 100 flaws in the first version won’t end up doing one test-repair cycle, they will go through seven before they are shipped with 11 Bugs. Software development with Olater tests might work if there were only a version, or if the software consists of a bunch of little modules that don’t change often. For example, ccompanies doing batch machine learning applications and data science departments may have this style of development, test, collect data and discard the code.

Kanban. Internal IT departments working on tickets with small software changes and bug fixes can adopt a Owaterfall type approach to testing. That is, observe the bug, fix it, test around the fix and deploy. This can be especially effective when the changes don’t introduce regression bugs or when the systems are isolated, like the IT department supporting the development of a hundred different applications independently, some for finance, some for HR, some for sales, and so on.