The Five Pillars of Testing

In today’s fast paced digital world, delivering high quality software is more crucial than ever. Software testing is an essential part of delivery to ensure reliable, and high-quality software. Without adequate testing, businesses risk poor user experiences, security threats, risk to business reputation, and costly failures. Teams should follow a modern approach to testing to keep with the changing times. We must not just be firefighters, finding bugs at the end of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), but bug preventers, thwarting bugs before they even exist.

In this article, I will introduce the Five Pillars of Software Testing. These pillars form the foundation of a strong sensible and modern testing strategy, to set teams up for success.

What are the Five Pillars of Testing?

Shift Left

Shifting left means integrating testing into the SDLC early before a feature has even started development. Examples of shifting left include assessing designs, putting test cases to the Business Analyst (BA) as part of story refinement, and embedding QA as part of the project from the start.

Teams can prevent issues rather than just find them, reducing the cost of delivery significantly.

Shift Right

Shifting right leverages data from production to influence and validate testing. This can include using real-world analytics for performance testing, assessing incidents, and adjusting test plans based on identified gaps or using monitoring to detect failures.

Teams can use the real-world data available to validate their own testing ensuring no stone is left unturned.

Test as a Team

Test as a Team involves everyone, from designers to BAs to embrace a quality mindset. It’s the whole team getting actively involved in testing and bringing hidden ideas from the team to the table.

This collaborative approach distributes the testing responsibility, reducing the risk of a single point of failure.

Quality Assistance

Quality Assistance means testers are guides for their team to build quality products. They use their expertise to assist their team to ensure that the team has architected and built a quality product.

By providing this expertise and support, they enable the team to effectively implement the Test as a Team pillar.

Test Lean

Test Lean focuses on optimising test efforts to enhance the efficiency of the development teams. This could be any process which isn’t efficient, for example utilising the Test Automation Pyramid to ensure that automated testing is not repeated in multiple layers.

Test Lean makes teams processes more efficient, faster, and more effective.

Summary

Ultimately, test processes need to change with the times.  By evolving our test processes and strategy, we can meet the demands of modern software development, setting our teams up for success. Adopting these five pillars ensures that teams are equipped to deliver high-quality software quickly and efficiently.