Part 2: Best Practices for a Successful Product Development
There may be a time when you want to grow your team but don’t want to rely on individual team members for all product knowledge. Your team can have a unified knowledge of all testing operations thanks to a well-documented test plan and test strategy. As a consequence, it can function efficiently even without any supervision. Furthermore, documentation aids in swiftly bringing newcomers up to speed and synchronizing the decentralized team.
Normally, training and orientation costs involve the amount of non-production hours, the manager’s time for introduction meetings, and the time of other professionals who takes the role in preparing the newcomer in getting ready for work. However, by providing elements of the processes, test documents help you to decrease the number of hours that other departments’ specialists spend on onboarding, while also saving time reading such paperwork.
Planning for Project Timing
Without having an in-depth understanding of testing, QA papers allow project managers to gain a clear view of what QA engineers are testing, how the testing team will achieve the necessary quality, and how much work will be done at each product development step.
Improving Risk Control
The test plan reveals what the team is in charge of and what is out of its hands. It lists, for example, third-party services and products, threshold situations that cannot be covered in the test environment, and so on. This enables for the control of not just risks but also expectations.
Forecasting Product Quality
Businesses frequently request documentation that completely governs product development (risk management, business growth plans, development roadmaps, etc.) They also want to know what steps the team takes to ensure the product’s projected quality. In most circumstances, a well-written test plan and test technique will adequately address this need.
Reaching New Markets and Customers
In areas such as banking and healthcare, the data safety and security standards of the entire process are quite high. As a result, audits and certifications are frequently required, which include formalizing all procedures for both parties.
It is necessary to have a test plan or documentation to address the following processes: development, human resources, data integrity, contingency plans, disaster recovery, third-party dependency, operational resilience, infrastructure, and so on.
Establishing a CI/CD Process and Collaborating with the Development Team
The test plan includes information that governs the quality steps that each feature must complete before being sent to production. This process is not visible to the stakeholders and works automatically, yet it is critical that everything functions well. Developers can use this part of the test plan to look for answers to questions such as which situations the functionality will be tested, what step and environment is anticipated, what level of unit test coverage is estimated, and what quality steps will be constructed when code streams from one environment to another.
How Do You Determine If Your QA Team Requires a Written Test Plan and Strategy?
A well-crafted test plan and test strategy ease out the testing process, benefiting all product stakeholders – customers get reliable software, leaders get a dependable growth roadmap, and engineers get a good perspective of their workplaces and can move quicker.
However, what if you have a quickly expanding business with a massive amount of things to execute, let alone write any documents? Saving the documentation till the latter phases of the product is a trade-off that temporarily relieves your duties. The same identical trade-off, on the other hand, might increase the amount of problems, approximate estimations that rarely reach the objective, unhappy consumers, and missed deadlines in the future. In order to maintain quality engineering on top and moving quickly, you must understand when it is appropriate to introduce testing documentation for the team.
Summary
It may seem apparent, but a test plan and strategy are essential – even if you think you’re doing OK without them. Incorporate quality assurance documentation into your processes. You’ll instantly realize how much it decreases the amount of errors, misunderstandings, and work hours because you won’t be doing duplicate work or missing steps.
