How Did QA Miss This?
An INFJ personality wielding brevity in speech and writing.
All bugs/QA are guilty until proven innocent.
If you’re a tester or part of the product quality team, you would have come across this question – “How did QA miss this” at least once during the release. While it can be challenging for a QA to identify the bug and do some quick fixes, it’s essential to know the reason behind this pervasive and intimidating question.
We’ve talked to our QA team and identified the five most common reasons. Let’s check it out one by one below.
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1. Time constraints
The product development process generally takes place in a time crunch and hands the product over to the testing team, thus testing as a last-minute activity. This not only stops providing enough time to identify defects and their root causes but also gets defects shipped to production and ruins the experience for the users.
Pro tip: Testers should prioritize the requirements based on the product usage and execute the test cases accordingly.
2. Inadequate Business Knowledge
The most common practice in companies is treating development, design, and QA in isolation. When teams work in siloes without a feedback loop, bugs are bound to surface in the production. Testers will design test cases or scripts in such a way that may not work well with the end-user scenario.
Pro tip: Involve QA in the requirement analysis and collaborate with product stakeholders to gain a precise clarity of objectives.
3. Changing Requirements
Any software is forever upgrading, and changes are pretty inevitable. Testers often make the mistake of not prioritizing test cases and running in the face of changing requirements. They try to test them all and waste their efforts on insignificant areas. No P1P2 defects get arrested as a result.
Pro tip: Be ready to adapt to changing requirements. Keep your communication open and update business stakeholders about the testing progress for more direct decision-making when falling short of time.
4. Inadequate test coverage
Any feature requires only the right amount of test cases, not too little or too much. This can lead to missing out on finding defects and lower test coverage. Converting Adhoc & production defects into testcases will help ensure test coverage improvement all the time.
Pro tip: Lay down test reviews, test coverage metrics, bi-directional traceability matrix – to help you have adequate yet effective test cases.
5. Skill & Knowledge
To err is human; hence not all bugs get uncovered at the right time and by the right team 😉. How did QA miss this? – This question calls for a constant scope for improvement, reviews, and improvement in the process by QA team.
Pro tip: QA should adopt new methods, technologies, and tools to equip themselves to test smarter each time.
Indeed, skills and knowledge help testers guarantee the best product quality.
Follow our LinkedIn conversation on the topic here
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