Test documentation includes all files that contain information on the testing team’s strategy, progress, metrics, and achieved results. The combination of all available data serves to measure the testing effort, control test coverage, and track future project requirements.
Key benefit It helps the testing team to estimate the testing effort needed, test coverage, resource tracking, execution progress, etc. It is a complete suite of documents that allows you to describe and document test planning, test design, test execution, and test results that are drawn from the testing activity. There would be at least one artefact that needs to be documented at each stage of a project.
Goals of Documentation QA documents collect information on test design, execution, responsible team members, metrics, and results. It provides a complex vision of the project and offers many practical benefits.
Removes the uncertainties of any testing activities; testing documentation stores detailed specifications of all planned tests, making it easy for team members and product owners to keep track of the products.
Helps set up the testing environment testing documentation, stores data on used hardware, automated tools, and frameworks, and describes product functionality in detail. The team can reuse this information for future text cases or give it to a newly onboarded member.
Offers stakeholders more insight into the testing process; detailed real-time reports allow checking of tangible testing results anytime. Stakeholders get an insider view of the team’s progress and can make suggestions.
Documentation helps analyze the efficiency of the testing; after analyzing the testing’s results and progress, the team can optimize the process. If the team didn’t meet their KPIs, the problem could be caught early, and testing practices could be revisited early on.
Most importantly, software test documents allow product owners and business managers to save time and money by reusing old successful practices and avoiding the ones that didn’t meet KPIs. It’s a long-term investment that not only improves the current testing outcomes but also can be reused for future testing tasks.
Transparency within the project could be maintained with Software documentation and helps solve most of the collaboration issues, including.
Shared teams: when software development and testers work remotely or as a dedicated team, there is a chance that a QA documentation specialist will face communication differences, potentially miss updates, and even dislike each other. Team documentation, with its focus on the end result, helps team members to remember that they work towards a united goal, which is to make a better product.
Lost negative feedback: if there is no clear report, a development team can lose track of some key product issues. If the product has multiple bugs, developers quickly get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. With real-time QA process documentation, developers can take a step back and adjust their plans according to the new feedback at any stage.
Delayed visibility: development and testing teams often can’t clearly understand what the other team is working on, especially if there is no detailed summary. Documentation quickly solves this issue by providing transparent overviews of each member’s current work scope and objectives.
Testing documentation is beneficial to product owners, testers, and developers. Whenever there is a shadow of misunderstanding, stakeholders and participants can come back to records and sort these problems out.
Listed below are a few of the test documents that would be used as part of the projects
Test strategy Provides an outline of the end-to-end approach to project testing. As the project moves along, developers, designers, and product owners can come back to the document and see if the actual performance matches the planned activities.
Test data The data that testers enter into the software to verify certain features and their outputs. Test data is distributed among the testing teams, developers and businesses while keeping the stakeholders informed.
Test plans Provide the technical and managerial approach to be followed while testing a component or a system. Maybe a Test plan would be the best testing document, essential for informed planning. The test plan is distributed between team members and shared with all stakeholders.
Test scenarios A scenario is like a story. In scenarios, testers break down the product’s functionality and interface by modules and provide real-time status updates at all testing stages. A module can be described by a single statement or require hundreds of statuses, depending on its size and scope.
Test cases A test case is a breakdown structure of a test scenario. Test cases cover step-by-step guidance, detailed conditions, and current inputs of a testing task. Test cases have their own kinds that depend on the type of testing — functional, UI, physical, logical cases, etc. Test cases compare available resources and current conditions with desired outcomes and determine if the functionality can be released or not.
Traceability Matrix Used to map test cases and their requirements. All entries have their custom IDs — team members and stakeholders can track the progress of any task by simply entering their ID into the search.
PSà Please read my recent blog on RTM that gives a detailed overview of Traceability.
Defect Report Defect report is a documented report of any flaw in a Software System which fails to perform its expected function.
A test summary report is a high-level document which summarizes testing activities conducted as well as the test result.
Key benefits of Software Testing Documentation
Improves internal coordination within the team; business owners should be able to check the code’s quality anytime, as well as check whether the team meets estimated requirements on deadlines and workload.
Increases the acceptance of the project team members define the requirements for the final product version at the beginning of the process — as soon as these requirements are met, the team and stakeholders know that the product “passed” evaluation successfully.
Improves team member interchangeability without records; the software testing team would have to familiarise themselves with the environment and re-learn the functionality. Documentation helps refresh the key aspects of the project.
Speeds up employee onboarding; there is no need to assign a personal mentor who would share project details with a new tester. A one-stop shop data is available in a single database.
Provides feedback on the planning cycle; the team approves documented plans early on to avoid misunderstanding at the later testing stages.
A reference point for future projects whenever a feature doesn’t work as intended, testers can turn to previously recorded cases and improve customer satisfaction by offering a quick fix.
Successful software testing management highly depends on documentation. Maintaining clean code is almost an impossible task if the team doesn’t have a clearly structured vision that relies on tangible data.
PS: Please write back to me if you need assistance, so I can help you come up with the best approach to your product’s testing and documentation.
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