5 Life Hacks to Protect Your Project from Escaped Defects

Every project team knows that there is nothing worse than getting a message from an annoyed customer that there is a critical bug found in production. 

'How did you let this get through? Did you even test this build?!' These are common complaints that could make your team feel anxious and insecure. 

Escaped defects do not only damage your company's brand reputation and authority but also produce chaos within the team. Developers rush to make hotfixes, software testers feel uncomfortable, and project managers struggle to handle this issue with a customer. While it is impossible to catch every single issue, there are life hacks to reduce the risk of critical bugs escaping into production.

Life Hack #1

As earlier defect is found, the cheaper and easier it is to fix. Instead of waiting till the end of the development phase, your QA team should start working on test planning and testing from the very beginning.

Software testers are full-time players in the following activities:

1. Elicit and analyze requirements
2. Identify and prioritize risks
3. Check inconsistencies in the design phase

If the QA team participates in all of these activities, then this may help prevent major issues before coding even begins. 

Also, testers need to work closely with the developers in order to validate functionality at an early stage. In this case, static code analysis and peer reviews can be handy.

Life Hack #2

Not all defects are equally dangerous. Some defects can be minor UI issues, and others can be critical as they crash the app or break the business logic. Because of this, the software testing team should employ the technique of test prioritization. What is it?

This may be your regular activity, which starts your testing cycle. 

1. Identify the most important parts of the application (work closely with the PO, BA/PM, and Devs)
2. For each important part of the application, you need to write test cases that allow you to ensure: 
   • Positive scenario testing
   • Negative scenario testing
   • Edge cases
   • Boundary values testing (if applicable)

Test management platforms may be handy for use, as they allow you to do the following:

• Write down well-structured test cases
• Categorize them by modules
• Plan them for testing
• Track test results
• Report defects directly via your test management platform 

Life Hack #3

Regression testing is inevitable, but do we always need to conduct this type of testing? Not really. Sometimes, this testing activity might be unrealistic because of the size of the application or the amount of features to be tested. The key approach here is to optimize regression testing.

Optimization of the regression testing is the process when you focus on the areas most affected by the latest changes instead of running all test cases throughout the app.

Impact analysis can help you determine what parts of the app need testing for this release. In order to conduct an impact analysis, it is necessary to identify the areas of the application affected by recent code changes and review the tickets, pull requests, and devs' comments to understand what was modified. After that, you need to assess dependencies by checking which modules, APIs, or databases interact with the updated components.

Based on the results of the impact analysis, testers run only a high-priority regression suite that includes the most critical scenarios. 

Life Hack #4

It happens, that standard scenarios are already tested, but bugs still exist. This may happen because not all edge cases are found out and described. In this case, exploratory testing is a great tool to find as many edge cases as possible and document them as test cases.

You need to plan the timeboxed session with a strict goal (1 module per session is recommended). Once a session begins, it is important to note each conducted step in order to be able to write down 'steps to reproduce' in the defect tickets.

These findings allow you to 

• Try the role of the end user
• Identify missed edge cases
• Ensure there are no inconsistencies in the app's behavior beyond standard user flows

Once these findings are documented as test cases, they can be prioritized and used for further regression tests if needed.

Life Hack #5

Sometimes, defects escape because of a lack of knowledge sharing within the team. Poor level of knowledge transfer results in a loss of critical information which leads to gaps in testing.

Testers should be closely involved in the feature discussion calls, daily stand-ups, and sprint reviews. 

Also, the QA team can establish one more type of team meeting called 'bug reviews,' where they present the findings, and the entire team has a chance to discuss them and plan for work. Such cross-team communication allows your development team to be always up-to-date.

To Sum Up

There is no silver bullet for killing all the bugs in an application. Quality assurance is reached via the team's dedication, knowledge sharing (osmosis is a handy tool for this need!), and comprehensive QA documentation.

It is useful to manage all the test management activities in one place, such as Jira + Confluence or a test management tool so that this information radiator is reachable for all the teammates at any point in time.