Testing Beyond Technology: How to Maximize Testing Productivity

1. Challenges in Multiple Projects
From adding new features to upcoming versions to developing new technologies and prototypes for future products, organizations require significant time and dedication from testing teams. Moreover, many diverse and unrelated applications often are being tested within one pool of testers. In these scenarios, if each project implements a unique test strategy, then testers moving among different projects can encounter substantial confusion. As a result of multiple project environments, experienced testers may not have enough time to become productive and new testers may face steeper learning curves.

2. Too Many Testing Standards
Due to the rigors of testing and the inherent inability to guarantee smooth processes post-testing, the testing industry has witnessed the emergence of multiple practices and standards – from Agile to customized singular solutions. To further complicate the multiple standards predicament, some industry experts have advocated for the integration of testing into the overall product life cycle while others have suggested the widespread adoption of testing only services. In addition to these differing perspectives, many new standards do not consider who is implementing the standard, i.e., whether they are testers or experienced process and business analysts. With such a wide range of standards and testers, the testing process can become too complex to implement and maintain and thus is disregarded or not followed properly.

3. Global Testing Partners: Quality and Knowledge Transfer
Reduced time to production has become a primary testing goal for many organizations. But, while many global “testing-only” firms successfully address this objective, the results often sacrifice quality in real-time environments. This is demonstrated by the growth of maintenance and support contracts, which signifies a shift in focus to fixing bugs rather than preemptive and comprehensive testing.

In addition to low quality results and increasing maintenance costs, transfer of business knowledge is a major concern when working with global testing providers. Most testing providers provide services across multiple platforms and software for a fee, but deploy a one-size-fits-all delivery approach. However, multiple products and environments require customized and differentiated management approaches, especially with in-progress governance, scripting and actual IS testing. Add to this mix the complexity of communicating with most international testing providers and the result is a deficient transfer of true business knowledge. Ultimately, these partnerships, when involving an ineffective global provider, may not minimize the number of fixes required in a production environment, which is the most important determinant of success in testing.

4. Limitations of Tools
Testing automation tools have not fully addressed applications in terms of complexity, ongoing development and enhancement needs and, perhaps most importantly, adaptability to changing business conditions. With limited tool sets, testing has become one of the larger inhibitors of effective product rollouts and flexible applications. The following section describes the limitations with testing automation products.

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