How to win the Testing World Cup?

The “World Cup” fever has taken over. And what will be a better time to write something about world cup than this? But in no way this article is related to world cup cricket! So please excuse me if you expected some nice world cup cricket analysis here.

But this article is surely about how to win the “Testing World Cup”! Never heard of it? Well, I am sure you must have faced such situation at some point of your career. Okay, let me come straight to the point. What does world cup means to a cricketer? It’s a life time dream, right? But at the same time the pressure and excitement is also just too much. To me, world cup is all about handling the pressure and keeping yourself cool in a really tough *pressure cooker* situation. The team who handles this well wins the cup!

And as testers we regularly face such situations whenever there is a Product Release round the corner. For us a Product Release is like a “World Cup”! Regardless of how much testing you have done and how much bugs you have caught, everybody waits till the Release with lot of enthusiasm. Coz, a Product Release is like a “Testing Mahakumbh” for any tester. The tester /testing team, who can handle the pressure and perform well, wins the cup! So it’s all about testing well in a tough situation! So here is where the testing skills come handy for a tester. It’s when we have to decide whether the Product is of good enough quality to be shipped. It’s when we have to find all important issues/bugs and get them fixed by the development team.

No doubt testing is an important process throughout the whole SDLC. But it suddenly becomes the most important activity among all, once the Product is getting ready to be released / shipped. So the pressure mounts on the testing team to a great extent. So it needs lot of skills and lot of experience to handle such tremendous amount of pressure. These are some areas that need attention during such high times:

1. Try to find crashing bugs. No user would like to use a Product that ends up crashing his system. So be careful and watch out for all sorts of things that can lead to a crash; like memory leaks, database errors, poor exception handlings, corrupt .dlls, missing system files due to a bad installer etc.

2. Try and identify the improper and missing functionalities and get them fixed.

3. Don’t forget regression testing. It’s your friend in tough times. Neglecting it may cost your product dearly. I am sure that no serious tester would forget regressing his older bugs as he knows how important is regression testing.

4. Smoke test your Product on a daily basis to look for new problems.

5. Have a track of all known bugs, test cases and bug fixes and sort them on priority basis. This will help you ensuring that the most important ones are dealt first.

6. Try and identify usability errors. Try out all possible navigation paths and all other little things that may affect your Product’s usability in an adverse manner.

7. Keep your ears open for your help desk call transcripts. Sometimes your user may find some important bug/issue and report it to your help desk (which you might have entirely missed). [I am assuming that a pervious version of your Product is already there in the market and you are testing your latest version now].

8. And last but not the least, don’t Panic!

If you and your testing team can handle this situation well, then no doubt you will end up winning the Testing World Cup in style. I hope you understand what I mean by wining (getting promotions, salary hikes, bonus, and of course the most pleasing among all - a gentle pat from you Manager on your back). So, are you ready for the Testing World Cup?

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About Debasis Pradhan

Debasis has over a decade worth of exclusive experience in the field of Software Quality Assurance, Software Development and Testing. He writes here to share some of his interesting experiences with fellow testers.