Key Benefits of Risk-Based Testing for Your QA Practice

Guest Blogger, Johnston Harris - CEO & Co-Founder of Appsurify

Where Does Risk Based Testing Help?

If your QA team is frustrated with not knowing where to focus their software testing, they are not alone. Most software testing teams have no way of determining which areas of the application have changed with recent developer commits, and so are forced to run their entire automation test-suite. But that’s the point of automated testing, right? Just run the tests and they’ll pick up any changes and alert the team promptly. Not actually the case!

Teams quickly figure out as their application grows, so do their automated test runs and the time it takes to give meaningful feedback to development. What used to take a couple minutes quickly grows into 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hours, and possibly days.

With tight release deadlines, testers find themselves not being able to test everything to their comfort level before releasing into production. They must juggle quality, cost control, and time to market every few weeks or risk looking bad. But won’t they look bad if they sacrifice quality over speed? Well, that’s a decision testers rarely like to make at the end of a sprint. Risk Based Testing can help make automated testing faster without sacrificing quality. Risk based testing is the practice of determining the risk associated with recent developer changes, and subsequently; only running the tests in that change area.

There are two obvious ways to pull this off successfully, the hard way and fortunately the easy way. There are two obvious ways to pull this off successfully, the hard way and fortunately the easy way.

Create Targeted Test-Suites

The hard way is to create targeted test-suites for important functional areas of the application. So when a bug is introduced in a sensitive area, testers know which test-suite to run to find the newly introduced defect quickly. However, this is a manual and time-consuming process and maintaining the targeted test-suites is a full-time job. Well then, what’s the easy way?

A Tool That Does the Job for You

TTC Global has recently partnered with the automated risk based testing tool, Appsurify TestBrain. TestBrain plugs risk based testing into existing QA practices to provide testers the ability to target their testing in only the areas that have been impacted by recent developer changes. Instead of running the full automation test suite through the CI pipeline, TestBrain automatically selects which tests have been impacted by a recent change - and automatically selects and runs just those tests for faster build times and immediate results. TTC recognized early on that established test practices often struggle with long automation test times and have found TestBrain to be an easy way to alleviate those pains.

Project Outcome

• 10x your automation test completion time while still catching 99.9% of changes
• Accelerate your CI Pipeline builds by only running the tests that matter
• Quarantine Flaky Tests to allow builds to pass on time
• Improve release schedules by getting feedback to the team in real time.

Final Thoughts

Software test teams are tired of software testing holding things up. TTC works with Appsurify TestBrain to bring immediate value to established test teams looking to remove the time it takes to complete software testing as a bottleneck to productivity. To learn more visit: https://appsurify.com/