Why Testing Fails?

Software Testing is necessary because we all make mistakes. Some of those mistakes are unimportant, but some of them are expensive or dangerous. We need to check everything and anything we produce because things can always go wrong.

Since we assume that our work may have mistaken, we all need to check our own work. However, some mistakes come from bad assumptions and blind spots, so we might make the same mistakes while checking our own work as we made when we did it. So, we may not notice the flaws in what we have done.

Ideally, we should get someone else to check our work because another person is more likely to spot the flaws. But sometimes despite of having a tester to spot all those mistakes, there are certain cases that sometimes even a good tester or QA fails to test. This results into Test failure of Software/ Application

Some Key Reasons of Test Failures:

1. In majority cases it happens that only the happy scenarios are tested, and testers don’t go out of the box to think of all the casual scenarios that a user might come up with.
2.  Sometimes exact and correct document chain sets are not shared with the QA team.
3. Few times it happens that software development is lacking behind the schedules timeline in that case due to deadline pressure and crazy release schedules, a tester is told to skip some minor cases.
4.  Lack of skilled testing.
5. Insufficient knowledge of business processes.
6. Mistakes by the analyst in the requirement specifications or design specifications going undetected during reviews.

One must analyze and consider their business users while choosing a proper QA method --Sunny Rajwadi

Best Testing Practices:

1. Learn to analyze your test results thoroughly. Do not ignore any test result. The final test result may be ‘pass’ or ‘fail’, but troubleshooting the root cause of ‘fail’ will give you the solution of the problem. Testers will be respected if they not only log the bugs but also provide solutions.
2. To ensure maximum test coverage, break your application under test (AUT), into smaller functional modules. Write test cases on such individual unit modules. Also, if possible break these modules into smaller parts. E.g.: Lets, assume that you have divided your website application in modules and ‘accepting user information’ is one of the modules. You can break this ‘User information’ screen into smaller parts for writing test cases: Parts like UI testing, security testing, functional testing of the ‘User information’ form etc.
3. While writing test cases, write test cases for intended functionality first i.e. for valid conditions according to requirements. Then write test cases for invalid conditions. This will cover expected as well unexpected behavior of the application under test.
4. Applications requiring critical response time should be thoroughly tested for performance. Performance testing is the critical part of many applications. In manual testing this is the mostly ignored part by testers due to lack of required large data volume in performance testing. Find out the ways to test your application for performance. If not possible to create test data manually, then write some basic scripts to create test data for performance test or ask the developers to write one for you
5. Go beyond requirement testing. Test the application for what it is not supposed to do.
6. While doing regression testing use the previous bug graph (Bug graph – number of bugs found against time for different modules). This module-wise bug graph can be useful to predict the most probable bug part of the application.
7. It’s a good practice to involve testers right from the software requirement and design phase itself. These way testers can get knowledge of application dependability resulting in detailed test coverage.
8. Increase your conversation with the developers and project manager to know more about the product
9. Don’t run out of time to do high priority testing tasks. Prioritize your testing work from high to low priority and plan your work accordingly. Analyze all associated risks to prioritize your work.
10. Write clear, descriptive, unambiguous bug report. Do not only provide the bug symptoms but also provide the effect of the bug and all the possible solutions.

Don’t forget that testing is a creative and challenging task. Finally, it all depends on your skill and experience as how you handle this challenge.