Involve Testers from the beginning

Now I will describe about the first step of Effective Software Testing in the Requirement Phase. Testers need to be involved from the beginning of a project’s life cycle so they can understand exactly what they are testing and can work with other stakeholders to create testable requirements.

A requirement can be considered Testable if it is possible to design a procedure in which the functionality being tested can be executed, the expected output is known, and the output can be programmatically or visually verified. Tester need a solid understanding of the product, so they can be devise better and more complete test plans, designs, procedures, and cases. Early test team involvement can eliminate confusion about functional behavior later in the project life cycle. In addition, early involvement allows the test team to learn over time which aspects of the application are the most critical to the end user and which are the highest-risk elements. This knowledge enables testers to focus on the most important parts of the application first avoiding over-testing rarely used areas and under-testing the more important ones.

Some organizations regard testers strictly as consumer of the requirements and other software development work products, requiring them to learn the application and domain as software builds are delivered to the testers, instead of involving them during the earlier phases. This may be acceptable in smaller project in a small company, but in the big company especially in financial company (my company) which have complex environment, it is not realistic to expect testers to find all significant defects if their first exposure to the application is after it has already been through requirement, analysis, design, and some software implementation. Testers need deeper knowledge that can come only from understanding the thought process used during the specification of product functionality. Such understanding not only increases the quality and depth of the test procedures developed, but also allows testers to provide feedback regarding the requirements. The earlier in the life cycle a defect is discovered, the cheaper it will be to fix it. In my first few days as software tester, I’d given so many documents contain requirements, analysis, and design to learn. And I had to discussed with another testers, test leader, test manager, and business analyst to make the best Test Design which results the best Test Plan.