A tester’s job is to find bugs. It’s critical that they find the important technical bugs and customer focused bugs. It’s even more critical that they find them as early as possible because they will be much cheaper to fix. However, in order to achieve this, testers have to do a great job testing.
We’ve done many issues in the past on test methods and skills, and our main reason for doing so is to get testers the skills they need in order to do the best testing job possible. It’s important to learn all the basic methods, test methods, and to leverage tools and technology where you can. With there being a focus on shift-left and as the technical skills of test teams increase, leveraging new tools as much as you can will be very beneficial.
Unfortunately, what we often find is that most developers and many testers do not understand the basic practices of Software Testing. Whether you are testing at the API or UI level, you still need to know how to do equivalence class partitioning and boundary value analysis to get the most test coverage with the most efficient set of test cases.
Apply important test methods—perhaps, adding a new interface earlier—to ensure that you do the best testing job possible. Knowing how to do concurrency and race condition testing is essential. Most people do that later in the development cycle when the product is fully built. Instead, maybe you can shift-left and do your concurrency and race condition testing earlier at an API level. The same idea goes for soak testing and other essential test methods: As long as you know how to do them, what they are, and when you do them in a process, based on your product and technology, you can really optimize your testing strategy. Building testing skills and sharing testing technology across development teams is something that cannot be overlooked.
In this issue, we take an in-depth look at a wide variety of testing essentials and methods. Our own Hans Buwalda discusses using Action Based Testing in TestArchitect in our cover story. Fred Murphy, a LogiGear alum, discusses the process of testing smoke detectors, Eran Kinsbruner returns to discuss progressive web apps and its impact on cross-browser testing, and Sankha Jayasooriya discusses how to test a mission critical system. Due to popular demand, we’ve created a fun word search for you. Rounding up this issue, we’ve also included a recommendation of books every software tester should read and explained TestArchitect’s awesome screenshot feature in TestArchitect Corner. Whether you’re new to the software testing industry or a veteran tester, this issue explores a variety of test methods and essentials you’ll need in your software testing journey!
To download this latest issue, visit www.logigear.com/magazine.
