June 2nd, 2017 by Thea Maisuradze
You're testing the latest release of your software. Time is tight as always. Your mission is to find serious bugs, so they can be reported and fixed before the product goes out to customers.
Photo by Ryan McGuire
No matter how hard you've been working, the risk of missing serious bugs is high if you have succumbed to any of these common pitfalls:
- You are logging in with an administrator user. Don't just check that users can do what they are allowed to do. Make sure the scenarios are properly handled when they are not allowed to do something. It’s always too easy to use a single admin login that can do everything. Wrong!
- Testing only with basic sample data. The sample data may not behave the same way as real data. Enter some real data or get some sanitized customer data. It’s not that hard!
- Testing mostly with one browser. Switch browsers often while testing. And make sure to test at least all of the newly added functionality on every important browser. Don't forget IE11!
- Running all the tests on the daily build. Don’t just run the tests on your build environment - It's essential to check a clean installation and an upgraded system. C’mon it won’t take that long!
- Waiting too long to run tests that are difficult to set up, such as email notifications. We’ve all been there, it takes time to setup the mail server, configure the notifications, so we don’t test it properly, or we wait until the end. Setup at the start instead!
Also, check out our Tip of the Day: Accessing and Inspecting DOM Elements with $0 for more software testing tips.
Next week I’ll post another useful hack on software testing and development. So, stay tuned!
To learn more about Inflectra, visit us at www.inflectra.com or call 202-558-6885.