How Software Testers Help Deploy Your Releases On-Time

Timely and high-quality software releases are the key to growth and success for many software companies, making software testing more of a necessity than a luxury.

Software testing is, however, not easy and requires a well-qualified software testing team along with clear guidelines and performance benchmarks. It also requires an in-depth understanding of the entire software testing process and a well-thought testing strategy to deploy the releases on time.

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In this blog, we share some best practices to improve your software testing process and deploy your software faster to your customers.

Examine Your Current Situation

Understanding the current situation is critical before improving any system or process.

You should evaluate the current state of your release process to get a clear picture of what is working well and where changes and improvements can be made. Then, walk through the entire process with the software developers and key stakeholders to get better insights on how the testing can be conducted before deploying the software.

While evaluating the current situation, you could look at the following factors.

• Testing environment
• Timelines for release (as well as any obstacles)
• Backlogs of products
• Documentation (or a lack of it)
• Automated procedures
• Roles in the release management process
• The morale of the team
  

All of these things impact your deployment speed and quality. However, you can develop more effective improvement plans when familiar with the current process.

Establish Clear Objectives And Benchmarks

What are your objectives for the release?

What is the most appropriate timeline for your company?

What are your quality expectations?

Of course, the answers will be determined by your team and company's priorities, resources, and strategy. You can create a more effective plan to achieve your goals and expectations only if you understand and outline them to the entire team.

This is especially important when motivating your development team and ensuring everyone connected with the software deployment is on the same page. Ultimately, your team needs to know the end objectives and goals to maintain consistent quality standards and delivery.

To get the team's buy-in, clearly communicate your priorities and expectations. You can meet those standards if everyone knows what is precisely expected from them and is dedicated to achieving the team goals.

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Document The Entire Deployment Process

A streamlined process is necessary for speed and quality deployments. Ensure your team access to the entire software release/deployment process documentation.

Documentation will help clear any misunderstandings and ensure everyone is on the same page. First, record what you do and how you do it. Then, include everyone in the process to ensure the documentation is clear, collaborative, and easy to understand and implement.

Everything will run more smoothly if everyone understands the goals, expectations, and process (as well as their roles during the entire deployment process).

Automate Processes Whereever Possible

Automation is one of the most basic but effective methods for increasing speed while maintaining and improving quality.

Automation frees your team's time to focus on more important tasks by automating repetitive manual tasks. This saves you substantial resources while reducing human error and ensuring consistent outcomes.

Examine your release process to see if any areas could be automated. These could include automated code quality checks, accessibility, usability, security checks, and automated regression testing.

Invest In Continuous Delivery

A focus on automation should include a discussion about continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is an aspect of the DevOps approach that focuses on quickly and sustainably getting code into production.

Continuous delivery enables organizations to release more frequently by automating testing for each new feature, bug fix, or change. Code modifications are automatically built, tested, and packaged for release using continuous delivery. This enhances the development process by reducing risks and ensuring a consistent release timeline.

Invest in continuous delivery to optimize and streamline your delivery processes so that you can release more products faster and more consistently.

Emphasize On The Role Of Software Testing In Software Releases

Software testing is critical to consistently delivering high-quality software releases. However, testing everything every time in a fast-paced software deployment environment with tight deadlines and short sprints may seem impossible. At the same time, not doing a proper QA check may prove expensive to your company in the long run.

Consider the following three suggestions when deciding where and what your Software Testing team should focus on in each release:

• Bug fixes should be prioritized based on usage. For example, code sections with a lot of use and traffic should be given higher priority for QA checks.
  
• Concentrate on the code areas that have seen the most significant changes. That way, you would not waste time on low-risk areas already tested in previous iterations. Instead, you can leave those to your automated checks.
  
• Discuss the release criteria with your development team and stakeholders to know what standards must be met. This will allow you to concentrate on verifying those standards so that there is no doubt about what was delivered.  
  

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Before Releasing, Test And Retest

When deploying the latest releases periodically, it may seem counterintuitive to repeat testing before release. However, repeated testing will help you catch any errors or bugs you may have missed earlier, optimizing resources in the long run.

This is why it is critical to establish a detailed software deployment process that includes automation and stringent testing standards. Build testing into each development stage through simple automation testing or a continuous delivery approach to keep standards high while maintaining speed.

Count On And Believe In Your Team

Your team members are experts. Take advantage of their expertise and insights as you work to improve your release management process.

First, talk to your team to find out what's working well, their challenges, and what improvements they would make. Then, implement their suggestions and communicate with them throughout the process to ensure clarity, boost buy-in, and gain support for new procedures.

Trust your team to complete the task once the changes have been implemented. Facilitate communication and collaboration, and ensure they have the necessary knowledge and resources.

When you trust your team and provide them with the tools they require, the development process will run more smoothly, and the quality and speed of delivery will improve.

Speed and quality will always be at odds with software development services. However, you can create an environment that consistently produces better products with the right tools and processes.

Blog: How To Hire A Software Tester - The Ultimate Guide

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How Can A Software Testing Engineer Accelerate The Release Deployment Process?

Encourages A Synchronized Work Environment

Integrated product development necessitates collaboration between the IT and business teams for better and quicker deployment of software releases.

Software Test Engineers work closely with all teams, maintaining quality as a top priority during the entire process and keeping everyone informed by providing real-time feedback on software performance.

By Using A Well Planned Approach To Software Testing

Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum are excellent examples of software test engineers' approaches. These approaches insist on incorporating quality throughout the entire SDLC.

Quality assurance techniques such as Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Pair Programming are intended to eliminate quality problems. TDD, for example, avoids quality concerns by writing tests before writing code, whereas Pair Programming aims to prevent bugs by involving two developers in each task.

These agile methods help reduce the time between each stage of the SDLC, ensuring quality by developing quality assured software in small increments, through close collaboration, over numerous iterations.

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Aids In IT Infrastructure Advancement

IT infrastructure is now cloud-based, allowing easy deployment and scalability. Furthermore, as devices become more intelligent and innovative, the world becomes more connected daily.

Software Testers, emphasizing quality throughout the SDLC, enable organizations to keep up with the changing pace.

Improves Bug-Fixing Response Time

Although bug fixing is essential to any new release, the bugs in usage data should receive the most attention.

Software bugs are quickly identified and fixed thanks to QA efforts, which are aided by the software's rapid delivery. This maintains user satisfaction and, as a result, increases brand value. Furthermore, if users report bugs, those bugs are prioritized for a fix in the next release.

Focuses On Security Testing

Most applications are subjected to security testing as part of the software testing process before each release.

Software testing engineers can also perform penetration testing on existing stable versions of soon-to-be-released products and updates. In addition, they can look for security flaws that could allow hackers to break into the system.

Manages Performance Testing

The team is briefed on new versions and features to assess the performance risks. Regression tests are sufficient when the developers add a new feature that does not impact performance.

If a feature has the potential to affect overall performance, writing and running new performance tests is a good idea. Performance testing is critical and can mean the difference between a smooth operation and a resounding crash.

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Conclusion

By hiring well-qualified and experienced software testing engineers you can ensure that your software releases are deployed on time. However, hiring software testing engineers is not easy and required considerable time and effort.

An alternative and perfectly viable solution to this problem is hiring software testers from Wishup. The software testers are qualified in some of the best testing tools such as Testim, Autify, and Selenium to test your projects and ensure faster releases.

To accelerate your software deployments and releases while saving costs and other resources, schedule a free consultation with Wishup.