Hurdles in software testing

Software testing is an exciting profession. But to keep yourself up in the competition, you need to be mindful of what you are doing and what all are hindering you and should be able to handle the hindrances to have efficient testing. These are some hurdles that a tester might face while doing testing:

• Not having clarity on the testing goal

Sometimes you may have to test a new feature or enhancement, but you may not be clear about the goal of testing. This can lead to problems in later phases of testing.

Solution: When the team makes initial discussions and sharing of ideas, ask your concerns and doubts and make sure your questions get answered. Also go through the available documents to make the testing goal clear.

• Depletion of testing ideas

This is usual when in some complex projects, you need to come up with new ideas or when the tester is so exhausted that he can’t decide on what to test. This is called Tester’s Block Syndrome. Here testers are not able to find new bugs.

Solution: 

Pair Testing- It is simply doing testing with a colleague. This can generate more testing ideas than those generated when you are testing alone.

Brute cause analysis- Here one tester thinks of a bug and other tester thinks of all areas and features where this bug can be present.

• Not having attention

There are chances that you miss a basic and obvious bug while busy doing test execution as per test case. This is an embarrassing situation.

Solution: Rather than blindly following test cases, think about the possibilities of test cases. How important are those? What are covered and not covered under the test cases? What product functionalities are covered under the test cases? While following test cases itself, keep eye open for other things happening too. Explore the areas not covered by test cases also.

• Inability to decide whether something works or not?

Testers sometimes get confused whether the failure that he saw was a bug or was a mistake that he made in the workflow? And later he sees that the bug he left unreported is being reported by a coworker.

Solution: You need to believe your instinct and report something that you feel is unusual to the developers. If you come across this situation it is good to take breaks and start with fresh eyes as they find more bugs. If possible, share the scenario in which you suspect a bug with a coworker and get it verified by him too.

• Inability to decide what to test and what to skip

Sometimes the possibilities and choices of testing are so many that the tester finds it difficult to choose. If the software under test is complex and technology used is complex also, the number of things the tester needs to consider while testing increases. Here if the time for testing is less, it would be difficult to decide what to test and what to skip?

Solution: Gather information regarding critical bugs and things that are very important to the user, by asking developers, reviewing documents, user manuals etc…Make a list of items that are prior considerations for the users. 

From this list test the most critical items first. If you get stuck at some point, stop, and choose the second item. Finish it and restart the first item. This way finds a balance between things to test and things to skip and meets the deadline too.

Above are all common problems faced by testers. Challenges faced will vary according to skills, experience, technology used, complexity involved etc… There are no hard and fast rules to mitigate these. But one should take responsibility for his own efficiency. Learn from the mistakes he made in the past. Upgrade testing skills and be ready to improve.