Let others do your testing

Whenever I sign off releases first question that strikes my mind is "Have I done adequate testing?” We all assent exhaustive testing is impossible. But when a customer points a bug, can you predict who will be in spot-light? – Yes, QA team who shipped the product.

Inspite of executing N cycles of functional/non-functional, regression, and automation testing till the deadline, limited defects may not be dotted until production. And one possible reason for this could be when testers test same product/component over a period of time they gain confidence over product & tend to miss defects. Here am not blaming fellow testers but that is human tendency.

So what we need is a fresh eye, I mean personas. That is, more scenarios can be covered by additional personas. To elaborate further, think of a simple user scenario “open a saved MS-Word document”.

Here I have listed few predominately used flows, still different persona can open same document contrarily. 

Again the point I would like to emphasis is need for more actors. Let’s see how to achieve it

• Pair testing – As it name implies, two members per team is necessary that is have a secondary owner for each component. Pairing with an expert or beginner enriches each tester’s capability. 
• Bug Bash – You may know this program/process with different name (other widely used captions include Bughunt, TestBash, PlayDay).  Once product is stable invite internal & external team members to play with it. Folks working in same product family can unfold many cyclic defects. 
• Betatesting – Exposing product to wider audience for validation. Here again audience refer to noteworthy stakeholders/potential customers. At times, beta version products mandates user to sign non-disclosure agreements. Tip:  Enroll yourself as beta tester, then probability of getting hired is pretty high 
• Crowdtesting – Do not confuse crowdsourcing with outsourcing.

Who watches the watchmen? 

So next time when you are ready to sign-off, ensure you use any of the above process to gain confidence about product’s quality & of-course about your test coverage. Guess I forgot to emphasize a pointer, only after enough testing these techniques adds value else it is similar to outsourcing :) :). Please share your comments, if any.