Have you ever spent any time defining and documenting the requirements for your software testing process?
No? I Didn’t think so.
I rarely see software test teams that have stepped back and worked out where it is they want to get to. We’re all so busy working to the next software release deadline that we forget to invest any time looking to the future.
We’re all guilty of looking to software solutions in the hope that they’ll free up time once we’ve implemented them successfully.
It NEVER works this way!
I can’t give you quick solutions to finding the time you need. I will stress that you’ll waste even more time if you pick the first quick fix for your software testing process. But you knew that anyway.
So why not find the time to implement the right software testing system, the right way, the first time round?
Consider thought that if you don’t know what you want then you won’t find what you need.
You see it’s impossible to select the right software if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve.
Lewis Carroll said – ‘if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there’.
Which is why selecting the first good looking piece of software to help your software testing process will usually take you somewhere you weren’t quite expecting.
In the long run it will save you time and money if you get your requirements right at the start. Then work towards implementing your selected tools to improve your test process. If you do it the other way round you can guarantee you’ll end up with at least some rework. Or you’ll start from scratch again.
The clearer your requirements, the less time you’ll spend on re-work finding the right solution.
I think it’s fair to say that we spend a lot of time slinging mud at our development teams and customers over poor requirement specifications. Then, when we come to implement software solutions to help our software testing process, we make exactly the same mistakes.
In any project, effective requirements capture separates the successful projects from the failures.
And that goes for us in the software testing arena too!