5 Ways to Improve the Quality of Tests

by Nataliia Vasylyna | April 14, 2016 7:21 am

Different teams have their own special features of software testing practice. Moreover, each software tester performs manual testing and automated testing in his own way.

There are, however, common tips that can help a tester to become more confident in his work and significantly improve it.

What Are the Recommendations to Create Better Tests?

• Test code, as well as production code, should be readable and understandable. If it’s not, a tester won’t be able to make correct conclusions about the health of the system.
• There are test patterns intended to make test code clean and readable. They are borrowed from production code rules. Good examples are ‘BDD’ and ‘3-As’ techniques. It’s a great idea for a tester to make a research to get to know these patterns and further use them to write tests.
• Unit testing[1], service testing and user interface testing[2] should be conducted in accordance with a test pyramid. It means that the number of created and executed unit tests should exceed the quantity of service tests, which, in its turn, should exceed the number of UI tests.
• A tester should learn to write deterministic tests. All unreliable existing tests should be rewritten in accordance with this technique.
• The usage of test doubles (or mocks) allows a tester to use only necessary things for tests. In this case, a very important thing is not to overuse them.

Of course, these tips are not a surprise for those specialists who have a wide experience in writing tests, test automation or test for white box testing[3]. Still, it’s a good idea to occasionally refer to them for better result.

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Source URL: https://blog.qatestlab.com/2016/04/14/improve-tests-quality/

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