Last updated on April 7th, 2024 at 11:39 am

The traditional waterfall model is now being replaced with Agile and DevOps, marking a new age in software testing. Previously, testing was done in the latter stages of the development process. With tight deadlines and the pressure of fast delivery, testing was done in a hurry, leaving many issues undealt. This resulted in a buggy application that required frequent maintenance, missed critical business requirements, and resulted in poor user experience.

However, in the current age of agile methodology, stakeholders and developers work together to make sure that every user story delivered fulfills the business requirements. Rather than prioritizing the delivery of the product, businesses must focus on the delivery of a flawless product. Also, testing is divided into multiple phases such as performance testing, usability testing, regression testing, accessibility testing, cross-browser testing, and many more.

Speed is one main thing demanded by customers worldwide. This puts pressure on businesses to deliver on time and fast-track the testing processes. However, doing this without a preplanned strategy can backfire, just like when following the waterfall model. In this article, we will discuss why it’s important to have a test management strategy in your current project.

Handling Frequent Changes

It’s important to keep the testing team updated with changing requirements. A tester’s efforts can go in vain when delivering a certain part of the application in one sprint only to know that in the very next, the client requires the same thing in a different manner or a completely new thing based on the same idea. This emphasizes how important dealing with the changing requirements is and why there is a need for an effective test management strategy to counter such problems.

Streamlined Tracking

For a smooth transition in a testing cycle from one stage to another, it’s important to maintain track of each testing phase, not only with respect to your production environment but also maintain a constant track of the staging environment. Test management can be strategized in such a way that it ensures that the progress is recorded in the form of a dashboard or report. This helps teams to detect any test requirement that is not compatible with the current as well as future projects. An efficient test management strategy helps to document the test cases which can be reused as well.

Tracking of Task Assigned

Collaboration is an important part of getting things done. Test management strategy ensures that individual efforts are combined to reach the set targets. For this, you need to keep track of the progress of tasks, whether they are performed or not, how much time is it taking to complete, and if the team members are performing as expected. It also helps in assigning tasks to the person whose skill set is appropriate for the completion of that task.

A Scalable Environment

While making a strategy for test management, it’s important to keep in mind that team members should have access to the data stored for easy information exchange regarding the project and knowledge documents. The use of test case management tools can come in handy as they allow scalable cloud-based data exchange by which the team members can access all the test data and metrics without any complication.

Real-Time Project Report

Test management strategy also helps in maintaining documentation based on how a product is tested in real time. Real-time reporting provides instant, on-the-spot analysis of what is happening on a specific project. You don’t want any kind of surprises when it comes to the progress of important tasks. Being late to see what’s going wrong adds more to the wrong. A thoughtful strategy can solve this problem. Also, even the development team can get an instant response from the quality analysts regarding a certain defect or bug, thereby enabling the project’s flexibility. Having a real-time report helps to speed up the overall QA process by providing continuous feedback about how a product is behaving from either the quality analyst or in the case of Agile, from the stakeholders.

Keeping the Test Data Secured

Lastly, your data security is dependent on how good your test management strategy is. Test management tools ensure secure data exchange among the team members via SSL-driven security procedures being free from the worry of information leakage or data misuse. Security parameters are also involved that ensure that individual team members can only access information meant for them and also the management can track the overall report along with data on individual work progress.