Hi,

Thought will share some best practices followed at our organization. Following are the best practices.

1.    Test checklists (Reusable test cases): Test checklists are test cases or test reminders. The company maintains checklists and regularly updates them which act as readily available test cases. These checklists can be customized and used as test cases, which drastically cut down on the time taken to write test cases. They have also proved to be crucial artifacts for “Agile” projects. The company ensures that the knowledge gained by the tester is passed into these checklists, once the tester finishes a project. These checklists are then shared across the testing team. 

2.    Reviews and Meetings:  Any test artifact, once developed, is reviewed by Test designers and by Domain experts.

Example: Once a test approach is decided and documented, the approach is reviewed by either or both the test designers and domain experts. The domain specific inputs and the test design inputs have proved very crucial.

The same process is adopted for the test cases and other test artifacts once they are developed. 

3.    Closer interaction with Development Team:  Testing cannot stand alone. It is intimately dependent on the development activity and heavily draws on the development practices. Effective testing also depends on understanding the development process, methods used and also to a great extent on understanding the developer. A tester in our organizationis a part of the development team, interacting with all the developers for requirements, test scenarios, workflows etc. With these interactions the code developed and the test cases developed are better. Smoke testing at the development environment has also proved to be effective in saving time.

4.    Perpetual evaluation of open source tools:  Our organization believes in providing quality which is cost effective. New open source automation tools are evaluated and the positives and negatives are identified. The information is then documented and shared with the team. The team is thus equipped to pick the right tool based on the needs of the project such as technology, testability, usability, maintainability etc.  Watir, Selenium, iMacros and Grinder are some of the open source tools. 

5.    Quality Dashboard:  Quality dashboard is a tool to provide the customer with regular inputs on the quality of each of the modules / components during the test cycles. The tool also provides a graphical depiction of the status, target to be achieved and the tasks / bugs etc, which needs to be addressed to reach the target.  This also powers the customer to plan better and influence the testing activity.

6.  ‘Nightly’ builds:  While every build is not necessarily ‘nightly’ tested every day, frequent builds from changes that are being promoted into the change control system are usually nightly tested. The advantages being that time is saved and the errors are identified quickly.