STA: How to improve our QA practices - Test Planning .

In our third sharpen the axe session we discussed how to improve our QA practices. As this is a rather broad topic, we decided to break it down a little further and focused on:

1. How do we test plan?

2. What information to include when raising a bug?

How do we test plan?

Test planning is an integral step of the SDLC to ensure we deliver a high-quality product, so we wanted to spend some time discussing how to optimize the process. It was such a fruitful exercise for the devs and QAs to collaborate and understand each other's perspectives. Following were the suggestions that the team came up with:

We then voted upon which suggestions to take on board and include as our Test planning standards:

1. Devs, QA, and Product Owner (if available) to have a quick catch-up to form a common understanding of the story and what should be tested. This is often called a 3 amigos session in Agile teams.

2. The story should have testable Acceptance Criteria and each of these should be tested. All positive and negative test cases should be documented.

3. Security implications of the feature should be considered and tested if applicable.

4. Discuss platforms and devices where the feature should be tested.

5. Discuss what test data is needed (if any).

6. Discuss and document what tools and access are required for testing.

7. Discuss and document potential areas of regression and what needs to be tested to mitigate any regression risk.

8. Discuss what is out of scope and won't be tested.

9. QAs can and should provide guidance on unit testing.

What to include when raising a bug?

While this may seem like a no brainier to any seasoned QA, we wanted to go back to basics, hear from our devs and standardize this process.

This is what the team had to say:

Have a bug template

This was one of our major takeaways, we will have a bug template in place that will include the following:

1. Title - Add a short descriptive title.

2. Description - Add a description outlining the issue.

3. Reproduction steps with any test data needed.

4. Screenshots or videos.

5. Build / version the bug was found in.

6. Devices/OS/ Browsers affected.

7. Expected results / behavior.

8. Additional logs if applicable, and timestamps should also be included.

9. Link to user story/ feature that introduced the bug (if applicable).

10. Identify if this scenario was captured in the Test plan. This will help us identify if there were any gaps in our testing.

We will continue to review and improve our QA practices as we strive for #excellence.