Enhancing Tester Value: Non-Coders Software Testing Strategies

Software testing is a process in which investigation is conducted to provide the information to the stakeholders about the quality of the product or service which is under test. Software testing provides an objective, independent view of the software so as to allow the business to understand the risks of software implementation. There is always a big irony with respect to quality. Quality is something which is not assured by the quality assurance team. It is the development team that assures quality. The customer experience is totally dependent upon each line of code written by the developer.

Developers are the ones who own the quality relationship with the customer. The QA team is to alert the broader organization about the risks involved. Today, a number of people are involved in software teams: developers, designers, testers, product managers, and stake holders. In the quality of the final application, all play a major role.

Most of the test automation scripts are written superficially, still there are several reasons to endorse automation testing. This is a matter of concern for those testers who do not code. However, there are numerous ways by which value of the testers can be enhanced. A motivated tester can definitely add more values to testing. Following are the several ways to enhance the values of a tester who do not code.

1. Finding more bugs: It is one of the most valued services that can be provided by a tester. Humans are quite better at finding bugs than machines. Humans can cover way more than automation engineers in a shorter amount of time. Finding the bugs is not a realistic goal of automation.

2. Feedback needs to be faster: Faster feedback is something that everybody wants. Humans can deliver faster feedback than automation engineers in case of new testing. Machines are usually faster on old testing (eg. regression testing).

3. Better test reports: Nobody cares about test results. One needs to find ways to sneak them in and make them easier to digest. Give verbal test summaries to your programmers after each and every test session with their code. Provide test summaries to your Product Owner.

4. Sit with your users: One needs to learn what is important to them and how they are going to use your product.

5. Work for your programmers: You need to ask your programmers what they are concerned about and what they would like you to test.

6. What if?: You need to show up at design meetings and have a louder presence at Sprint Planning meeting. Come up with the “what if” scenarios. Use your domain expertise and user knowledge to conceive the conflicts. Keep the explicit assumptions aside and challenge the team, even at the risk of being ridiculous.

7. More of security testing: Security testing is the part that cannot be automated. You must develop expertise in this area.

8. Bring new ideas: Develop new ideas by reading testing blogs, books and by attending conferences.

9. Considering Integration: Interact with more people who build the products that integrate with your product and learn to operate their product and perform integration tests.

10. Help your automation engineer: Engage with your automation engineer to tell them what you think needs to be automated. Try to figure out which automation they are struggling to write or maintain, then offer to maintain it yourself, with manual testing.

11. Get visible: Be visible when you find a bug and also when you don’t.

12. Help code automation: As you’re not a coder so don’t try building frameworks, designing automation patterns, or new automated checks. Find out if there are straight forward automation patterns that you can reuse with new scenarios.

Kanika Vatsyayan

Kanika Vatsyayan is Vice-President – Delivery and Operations at BugRaptors who oversees all the quality control and assurance strategies for client engagements. She loves to share her knowledge with others through blogging. Being a voracious blogger, she published countless informative blogs to educate audience about automation and manual testing.