Why Lean Testing? How it could be implemented to achieve the quality?
Introduction
The fundamental aim of the software testing is to deliver a quality product or an error-free product, free from all the bugs implying the exceptional handling and risk management mechanisms. Unfortunately, the testing standards followed by organizations aren’t delivering satisfactory output and mostly failed to fulfill the customer requirements due to the unwanted changes or attributes. The lean testing mechanism desired to remove the redundant material and defects from the software to produce quality products exclusive of bugs. It also includes the unnecessary product expenditures responsible for them over-budget.
Result
Primary principles of lean software testing
In this report, we are analyzing essential lean principles for the testing of software that will assure the quality of the final product.
Eliminate Wastage
While contemplating the software development and testing life cycle, the production of software is bounded to the time limit. Rather than implementing and testing all components first, we had to identify the prior requirements of the product. Avoid the requirements that aren’t adding value to the product. The time is limited and, we should focus on the development and testing of the prior requirements to assure the quality product.
Regular amendment
We are consecutively learning and implementing new things during the development and testing of the software. Significantly we have to adopt the changes that are beneficial to produce a quality product. Unlike the traditional testing documentation and test scripts, the software product should be portable enough to adopt the changes in the testing mechanism. The previously followed test scripts and documentation are difficult to revise; throwing away the old testing scripts is not the solution. We need to modify the frequent changes in the testing methodologies and customer requirements as per desire.
Collaborate and Communicate
We should be very clear about the changes we have made in our product. Direct communication is maintained with the product stakeholder; the communication strategy will be beneficial to achieve the required quality. The stakeholder should be aware of the changes made to the product; the team should implement the desired changes according to customer need to achieve the customer’s satisfaction.
Example of the situations implementing lean principles
The software product highly depends on the quality attributes of the product; the testing phase assures if all the requirements were fulfilled sequentially to attain the desired quality product. Most of the time, the product manager failed to understand the customer requirement that directly results in customer dissatisfaction and poor quality. For this reason, direct communication should be maintained between the customer and the team including, tester and developer to achieve customer satisfaction. Also, some of the requirements described by the customer are not essential for the product or the primary components muddled because of the additional requirements that will result in failed test results. The team should eliminate unwanted material from the product and collaborate with the stakeholder to thoroughly explain the changes made by the team. The software procedures are not following the same requirements; the consistent change in requirements is being followed by software development and testing. We are prioritizing the requirements sequentially according to the customer desire; If there is a change in modules by the customer, the software procedures should be portable enough to adopt the changes respectively and maintain transparency. After redesigning components, the team should analyze the product as a whole and define the effect on other components due to the change in particular requirements while testing all the modules.
Example of Principles and practices implemented in the old project or to be used in future projects.
While developing the shop management system (previous project), we had determined the budget and time constraints that duly affect the software product. We had a period of 3-month and, we had settled the budget of 7$. The simplified requirements are collected for this project so that it could be implemented within the specific period, after a month, our development team was occupied by irrelevant components which are creating difficulties during testing. As a project manager, I was responsible to collect all the requirements from the stakeholder and sequentially implement the prior requirements. Due to the limited period, we had to eliminate the additional requirements which can be implemented in future, before excluding those requirements we informed the stakeholder about the relevant changes. Also, the team developer constantly involve the stakeholder to achieve the customer satisfaction level. While cutting off the waste material, improve the budget and consequently, the project was completed within the required period but still, it requires a lot of improvement while following lean practices.
Conclusion
Lean testing is a simplified strategy for testing of the software product. It assures the qualitative development of the software product while eliminating irrelevant components. This report discusses the lean principles useful for multiple situations and some of the fundamental principles to be used in the organization for product testing.
Reference
https://medium.com/@AWGHodder/lean-testing-f900b5a7e82e
https://qanalysisblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/10/what-why-how-of-lean-testing/
http://testerkiwi.blogspot.com/2016/02/lean-testing-in-theory-and-practice.html