How to Develop Effective Application Test Teams

Automation testing skills

You'll need a particular set of skills if you want to use automation for your testing. Test automation tools allow you to automate important activities such as regression, performance and reliability testing. Regression testing checks whether or not changes to your application broke existing features. Performance testing checks for slow response times under various likely levels of usage. Reliability testing checks for frequent or lengthy application availability problems.

It takes years to learn how to do test automation properly. There are horror stories out there about companies that lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on failed test automation projects, so make sure that anyone you hire for such a position has been through a lot of test automation projects.

You might also need people with testing experience in your application domain or industry.  Some businesses, such as those in medical systems and banking, find that regulatory compliance issues associated with their application have important implications for testing—implications known only to experienced testers who have previously tested such applications. Other businesses, such as those in video games and oil exploration applications, find that special knowledge of how the applications work is essential. That said, don't overestimate the value of application domain knowledge because that route often leads people to employ business analysts and users exclusively, with the poor outcomes mentioned earlier.

A proper, professional test team has the right mix of skills and experience for the complex and often underappreciated job of checking the quality of applications. Not only will such a team often find twice as many bugs as one composed of non-testers, but they will also typically save their employers the cost of employing them, many times over. Professional test teams can save companies anywhere from 40 percent to 3,200 percent more than the team costs, primarily through avoided costs of production failure.

Armed with the proper test team, you are ready to achieve your quality goals—and save money while doing so.

Rex Black is President of RBCS. Rex is also the immediate past president of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board and the American Software Testing Qualifications Board. Rex has published six books, which have sold over 50,000 copies, including Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Hebrew and Russian editions. Rex has written over thirty articles, presented hundreds of papers, workshops and seminars, and given over fifty speeches at conferences and events around the world. Rex may be reached at rex_black@rbcs-us.com.