7

EBOOK
2020 EDITION

TACTICS FOR
More Eff icient
SOFTWARE TESTING

WWW.GETTRUDON.COM
Contents.
01.
Use Early Adopter Customers

02.
Gradually Release To Production

03.
Create Well Defined Issues For Your Dev Team

04.
Use Chrome Emulator To Test On Mobile Devices

05.
Which Test Goes Where?

06.
Monitor Critical Flows In Your Appluction

07.
Involve Non-Techical People In Your Qa Process
Use Early Adopter
Customers To Test
Your Application

#1
#1

Why it works.
Beta, alpha and even nightly releases are a great way to release
new features. And who could be more interested in your pro-
duct’s new feature than your existing customers?

It’s a win-win situation.

Your customers get exclusive access to new features (and that

is of course a nice feeling for them), but they also provide valua-

Expected
ble feedback about those features, including bug reports.

In a sense, your customers will function like part-time testers.

With early adopter programs, you reduce the risk of delivering

bugs to high-paying customers. Early adopters are usually for-

Outcome
giving and happy to help, so you can funnel new features throu-
gh them before reaching the more scruffy, sensitive customers.

light
test your
application
How to implement. and get
valuable
This is in fact quite easy to achieve. Well, after you find your early
feeback
adopters :) from
In the simplest way, you can give your early adopters access to leveraging
your application staging environment.
your existing
If you don’t have a dev environment yet, you should create one, base of
customers
and have a few tests running there too.

Many well-known software had public Beta stages, including

MacOS, Windows and Minecraft, so why not give it a try for your
SaaS application?

.4.
Inside TIP From
TRUDON’s
Team

Take great care to always

prioritise bugs and
requests coming from
early adopters, they need
to be acknowledged and
rewarded for their help
Gradually Release
To Production

#2
#2

Why it works.

Delivering a set of features abruptly to all customers is risky, be-

cause it’s hard to predict the outcome. This means you will get
similar bug reports from a lot of annoyed clients.

Expected
However, like releasing in stages and targeting to early adop-
ters (Tactic #1), you can also fan out your features horizontally.

Outcome
How? Release each batch of features gradually to more and
more customers. If any issues should arise, only a small part of
your customers will encounter them.

Until the scheduled moment of full release, your development

team has time to fix bugs and performance issues.

delay the
occurrence of
How to implement. any possible
bugs, up
until your
development
Talk to your development team about how you can deploy fea-
tures only for some designated customers. Most frameworks
should offer support for doing this pretty easily.
team is ready
Gradually release or enable those features to, say, 5% of your and capable of
solving them
customers on Monday, 10% on Tuesday, 15% on Wednesday and
so on.

Stop releasing to more customers if anything problematic

appears and give your development team a chance to interve-
ne. Resume once all issues have been cleared.

.7.
Inside TIP From
TRUDON’s
Team
Collect feedback for a
feature only after you
enable it for a specific
customer

Do not confuse customers

by mentioning features
that are completely
foreign to them. Such
actions will also skew your
feedback process
Create Well Defined
Issues For Your
Dev Team

#3
#3

Why it works.
Badly written ticket issues come back when you least expect
them, in the form of emails, back-and-forth assignments and
questions from the team.

Define issues and you will spend less time communicating

with developers and testers further down the line.

Added bonus? Your team will be happier.

Unsurprisingly, people like being 100% sure on what they are

supposed to do. Make that happen and productivity will follow.
Expected
Outcome
How to implement. save time
spent
Make sure you are reporting a bug that can be reproduced, or
a clearly defined feature.
during
business
When reporting a bug, try similar steps to identify how generic
the bug is. and add a short, descriptive, one-sentence title to it. processes
A meaningful description should cover the following:
and
prevent
— environment (local, dev, test, production etc., whatever your
setup may be) specs from
— logged in account used, if applicable + password
— steps to reproduce, including accessed URLs and inputs
being
used in forms, in chronological order. Do not skip steps, even if “lost in
they seem trivial. One checkbox can change the entire flow and
waste time trying to reproduce. translation”
— consequences: what happens after completing the steps to
reproduce.
— expected/suggested behaviour

.10.
Inside TIP From
TRUDON’s
Team
Stay on point: Inclu-
de everything that is
useful, but still keep it
simple and concise

Attachments like
screenshots, log files,
error messages help a
lot
Use Chrome Emu-
lator To Test On
Mobile Device

#4
#4

Why it works.

Here is something that stands true for most web pages: Most
of your visitors come from mobile devices.

Responsive design is one of today’s priorities, and you always

need to make sure that your application looks and works as
intended, regardless of the platform used.

Making sure your application works seamlessly on all mobile

devices will assure consistency no matter the device your cus-
tomers use. Expected
Outcome
How to implement.
Increased
To simulate how your application looks on various mobile de- product
vices, you can use Chrome browser’s Dev Tools, specifically the
Device Viewport Mode.
quality, in
your users
eyes through
Devices supported include most iPhones, some Galaxy and
Pixel phones, plus others. Check the explanations from Chro-
me here
consistent UI/
What to test? UX accross
Depending on how much time you have on your hands: devices.
— at least do a visual check that all buttons are in the expected
places, for each device.
— check that nothing gets weirdly cut or floats around the
viewport
— start looking into special elements such as forms, sliders, co-
ver images etc. Are they responsive? Do they look decent on
the page?

.13.
Inside TIP From
TRUDON’s
Team
In theory, checking the
visual aspect should
suffice for a *minimal*
testing.

But moving forward, you

should also check end-
to-end business flows.
Which Test Goes
Where?

#5
#5

Why it works.

There are many different tactics to test an application, but some

are most effective in specific setups or environments.

Some testing tactics are adaptable to both manual and auto-

mated testing.

By using different test types where they are most relevant, you
can save a lot of time and maximize your testing effectiveness.
Expected
Outcome
How to implement.
maximize the
You should be creating automated end-to-end tests for dev effectiveness
and staging environments, making sure all important flows
from start to finish are working as expected.
of your tests
by using
If you are just starting out, prioritize testing per business value,
e.g. an e-commerce site should start by testing the checkout different test
flow, a time management application should start by checking
event scheduling etc. Run these automated tests as often as
types where
possible: at least when merging new functionality and before they make
every deployment.
the most
In production, you can’t usually test end-to-end flows, because
they have real side-effects. But that doesn’t mean you should
impact
ignore the production environment. Try smoke testing, which
is a reduced set of tests that only checks basic functionality.
Smoke tests that do not change data inside your application,
but make sure interfaces work, buttons are visible and clicka-
ble, forms are fillable etc. You can implement them manually
or using an automated tool.

.16.
Inside TIP From
TRUDON’s
Team
Stay informed about the
benefits of different testing
methods and tactics.

Always diversify your tests

smartly.
Monitor Critical
Flows In Your
Application

#6
#6

Why it works.

When testing, the aim is to reproduce conditions that are as clo-

se as possible to real life.

But that is not always possible and some things simply can’t be
tested beforehand, like the availability of a third party API or the
exact speed your application will have in production.

Application monitoring is one of the best additions to your QA

toolkit that will overcome these limitations. Expected
Monitoring polls the application and checks its availability and
performance perioadically. Outcome
By monitoring critical flows in your application you can detect
speed bottlenecks and downtime and take action immediately.

create a more
comprehensive
How to implement. QA process,
by constantly
You can simply use a monitoring tool to implement this.
monitoring your
There are a variety of monitoring tools available on the market, and
application
depending on your choice and budget, you will get more or less in-
formation.

Monitoring separate flows is much better, since you can make sure
that, at all times, important flows (like login, signup, checkout etc.) are
available to users.

A data analysis can show you whether you need to upgrade servers,
switch to different 3rd party vendors, optimise flows and, in some ca-
ses, determine the cause of application downtime, all based on the
information received from the monitoring tool.

.19.
Inside TIP From
TRUDON’s
Team
Research monitoring
tools thoroughly before
committing to one.

Make sure everything

that’s important for
your application is
included in the chosen
pricing plan.
Involve Non-Technical
People In Your QA
Process

#7
#7

Why it works.

Treating QA as a single point of view affair is not a good idea.

It is very important to trust QA engineers to do their job and not

micromanage them.

At the same time, their perspective can sometimes be limited

to technical aspects that might threaten the effciency of your
entire QA process.

Including non-techical people to your process can give a diffe-

Expected
rent perspective on how an actual user might use your applica-
tion, helping you identify and test important flows that otherwi-
se you might have skipped or considered not important.
Outcome

avoid bias
How to implement. that might
compromise
your results
For the best testing process, leverage the knowledge of:
by looking
— people who have never used your application before, both at your QA
process from
from your domain and complete outsiders.

— product and business owners, who can better prioritize busi-

ness needs and the importance of specific test flows
different
The key problem here is communication. To improve commu-
perspectives
nication between technical and non-technical people that test
the application, see how you can report issues better (Tactic #3).

.22.
Inside TIP From
TRUDON’s
Team
Take great care not to
micromanage your QA
department.

Management-level
insight is incredibly
valuable, but that
doesn’t mean treading
on other departments
or employees.
 Make your QA process
more efficient with
TRUDON

Trudon is a platform
that enables 6x faster
functional testing for
SaaS applications.

All tactics described in

this ebook can easily
be implemented using
Trudon, without writing
any code.

START FREE TRIAL NOW

 THANK
YOU

We are all about QA efficiency. Ever since

starting Trudon, we focused our efforts on
making QA smarter, easier and all-across
faster.
These 7 tactics are surefire ways to make
that happen, regardless of whether you
use Trudon, plan to use it or not. Think
of them as our way of giving back to the
SaaS community.

—Trudon Team

www.gettrudon.com