Challenges for Functional Test Analyst in sequential projects and ways to overcome them
Some of the challenges faced by the Test Analyst in sequential projects are:
During Requirement phase
• Requirements not ready
• Requirement very high level/not clear/ambiguous
• Unavailability of Business Analyst for clarification of requirements
To overcome these challenges testers should gather enough information about the domain/project before going through the requirement’s. They should start going through the requirements as soon as the draft versions are ready. Walk through sessions with the business analysts should be arranged for any clarifications. Having early and regular communication with business analyst will help to overcome any ambiguity from requirements perspective. In absence of business analyst SMEs from business should be approached for any clarifications.
During Development phase
• Requirements changing frequently
• Issues with test data and test environment setup
To overcome these challenges testers should keep regular communication with business analyst will enable them to have early visibility of any requirement changes. If external teams are helping with the test data and environment setup these should be informed in advance and then a regular follow should happen. If the testers have to create the test data, time for test data preparation need to be refactored into the test plan. Leveraging automation tools for test data creation is also, helpful in most of the instances.
During Test execution phase
• Test environment not ready to perform testing
• Build not ready to perform testing
• Codependent projects
• Test environment not stable
• Test data not ready or issues with test data while testing/not enough data to test defects/issues
• Masking/privatization of data
• Testing behind schedule/not enough time
Testers should set up early communication with team responsible for environment preparation, this will help in finding issues early. Tester should plan for sanity test of the environment well before testing is started, this should also be refactored into the test plan. This will provide early visibility of environment related issues. Issues should be e escalated and addressed as soon as possible.
Enough time notifications should be given to other teams to prepare test environment and data. Tester should ensure to create extra data during data preparation which may be required to test the failed test cases or to support another round of testing in case of major failures.
Test data requirements should be captured early while test cases are written. Testing team should try to explore ways to reuse the scrambled data from production environment and any automation tests which can help the team for any form of data preparation.
If the production data is used for creating test data testing team should be aware of which data fields are masked so they don’t raise any unnecessary defects regarding those fields.
When the testing is behind schedule testing priorities to be reexamined with the help of business stakeholders and if needed extra time and extra resources should be requested early.
Before going into testing phase testers should make sure to understand the Test plan, test case dependencies, test data dependencies and business process dependencies.
It is very important for the testers to show problem solving capability and team spirit and not to blame others for the situation. Testers should try to demonstrate pro-activeness, flexibility and commitment rather than just being passively observing the issue.
* extract from my book " Interview questions for Functional Test Analyst"