Hosted platforms like Testopia, Mantis and Redmine help Customer-vendor/service provider collaboration for Information transfer and QA progress visibility in an outsourced engagement.

Testopia (An integration of TestRunner Test bench management platform with Bugzilla, a Defect management platform), offers mutual visibility & collaborative leverage on all structured phases of a QA exercise starting from Test Case creation to Defect reporting, through the intermediary stage of Test run creation. A Test run is the execution of a partial set of Test cases, as per Testopia terminology.

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Manual Software Testing in its true sense is human intelligence at work. Many even within the testing arena consider this just as a labor intensive activity that could easily be automated completely. Well labor intensive is quite correct in many aspects, it is also correct that some of these tasks can be automated, but it might be very wrong to say that manual software testing can be completely replaced by QA tools and applications.

For every organization with a software development group should have come across the need for improved test coverage. The more you test the more confident you are to release a product or put a stamp of quality certification on the same. While the reality is that the testing effort often misses the last bus to get a place into the overall project budget. Even if it manages to get in, it is more than often that it is asked to step out for giving seat to a development priority.

But when unhappy customers scream back with loads of bugs in their hand you are right testing takes the blame. And many times development shops overlook testing because they feel this can be looked into at the last phase, which is way away from the absolute truth.

There are even the wiser ones who think they could buy an off the shelf tool and ‘Bingo’ you have a tested product coming out.

“Too good to be true; and not very wise for any price” You would agree

After all, why does someone underplay the importance of human intelligence in testing, it’s a simple fact that you can’t replace good testers with good tools

Bottom line, don’t ever procrastinate the manual software testing effort, if you do you bet you are on a speedy road to an imminent fiasco

“Oh! Manual testing costs the sky and is tough to manage” many people keep saying and here are a few questions to all the skeptics out there who think Manual Software testing is not the way to go. Assuming that you have had an experience of manual testing not producing expected results… please read on……

1. Did you have a structured QA process to execute before you loaded your testing army?

2. Did you have a different set of people do the testing or did you buy two pairs of Jeans for the development folks and asked them to find fault with what they did in the first place?

3. Did you look at the option of outsourcing the work so that you can manage the result and not the activity?

4. Did you budget for testing and use it, or did you throw in that last left pennies to someone who sat and explored your application and came back confused?

5. Did you invest on tools and forget about the hands and heads that operate them?

Take my word, you might give me the best answers for all the above question, but if you have been unhappy with the result of a manual software testing effort before, I bet you should blame the execution and never the importance of the action.

One more simple truth before we close

Only real people are true to find severe bugs before other real people (your customers) find them. Tools just aid……..

Get to the market hire a tester, or hire a company that can do it for you for the price you and you friends spend on beer (assuming you all don’t bathe in beer)

“Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius”

The role of consistency in success is so important that at times a consistent under performance will add more value than high performance that contributes inconsistently

Take the example of Manual Software Testing where the ability of the individual tester and the process that they adhere to together produce the expected results.

A few random thoughts on your journey to achieve a Consistent Manual testing effort

1. Following a religious Manual Software testing regime

Finding a ‘bag of bugs’ can’t always be attributed to a tester’s efficiency alone, what if the software was so faulty and that anyone with ample common sense and ingenuity could break it. Assuming that our software is not faulty we can give the credit of uncovering the bugs completely to the tester and explore further

Does that information make our effort consistent, never!!!!…

If you do the activity for one month and skip a few months while you do development and changing the application functionality in the course you will be back to square one in the third month.

It is important that you have an ongoing manual testing effort for pre-defined hours daily, or at least monthly so that you can have the following achieved

• A continuous eye for defects
• A repeatable effort that can be Predictable in its outcome
• Building up of a Health Matrix that can add inputs to your development efficiency

2. A Process for Explorative Testing

Many organizations that resort to exploratory testing as an initial effort in manual testing often do not get the expected result for the lack of a proper process. While Ad-hoc discovery & intuitive testing contributes generously to the planning and organization of target Test areas, it is important that you have a structure in place before you embark

There are no quick replacements for a structured process as this is what ensures the predictability and consistency in any effort

Hence achieving consistency in testing begins with having a structured & documented Test bench to rely upon.

3. Maximizing Documentation

Even when you have a Test Bench in place the testing effort often stumbles upon many product behaviors that were not evident earlier. I recently happen to read about a framework QQA that I guess takes out a lot of ambiguity in managing an exploratory testing adventure. Consistent Testing is a result of Test bench management being in line with the Product functionality Change.

Maximized documentation is a core success factor in driving an explorative testing exercise and often the most overlooked. The Application Profiling activity as part of the QQA Framework is an interesting concept where you build a product functionality Matrix that can bring forth the testable behavior of an application and also map your test bench to the changing product functionality

Maximized documentation or Application Profiling techniques can also help considerably for having an even distribution of Test coverage among the participant Testers.

Bottom-line is that we need to have a process and structure along with a consistent effort invested monthly upon to get a predictable performance so that you can steer the ship through all weathers.