The process of software testing is an important part of the whole web product development in one way or another. It should be as effective as possible in the first place in order not to delay the final release of the software. For these purposes, project teams improve their solutions on the processes of development and testing program products.

To correctly assess the effectiveness of the software testing process and its improvement; it should have the most detailed description. Also, all its technical aspects must be communicated to each team member.

The description of the testing process helps to make it as accessible and transparent as possible for the entire development department, and also it reduces uncertainty in daily activities.

Plan-Do-Check-Act

During software testing and tasks performance, specialists use a special PDCA method (Plan-Do-Check-Act) when making some changes:

• Always plan working changes that may be focused on the improvement of the general testing process.
• Do. Try to analyze the action in a small area of activity.
• Study. Analyze the results. What did you learn during testing?
• Take action. Make changes constantly or simply discard them. You need to repeat this cycle, especially if you have a constantly changing development/testing environment.

To visualize the software development process, use the Jira virtual dashboard. It allows you to set a limited number of tasks simultaneously involved in development. If an urgent task or blocker appears, you can easily return it to the backlog and take the more important task at the moment.

Also, Kanban has such an option as daily. It enables daily discussion that helps analyze current tasks but not the work of particular employees (like there is in Scrum).

The discussion starts with the most priority tasks – they are in the right column. Then you should go to the left one answering the question: “What prevents you from moving task to the next column?” The most important scenarios are in the right part of the program graphical interface.

The Testing Process

Imagine that we have several testing graphical boards and a feature board where the newest functionality is tested.
To perform the testing correctly, all the planned tasks (bugs) should be moved from the left side of the board to the right one.

The Specifics of Software Testing in Kanban

If we analyze these steps, we will have the following:

1. During the work, QA makes a checklist to thoroughly test the functionality that is at the stage of verification and realization.
2. When a defect goes from the In progress status to Verify, a tester assigns a task to himself so that other QAs see that this task is already taken.
3. If a new bug is detected during testing, a task goes to the Reopen status. Also, if needed, specialists can add a comment or steps to reproduce.
4. If there is no new bug, we create a test scenario and change the status of the bug to Business acceptance.
5. When the testing is performed, all the tasks get the Done status. If a business customer moves some task to the Reopen status, the whole testing cycle starts from the very beginning.
6. As soon as the task gets the Done status, the software developer should lay out the product release on the acceptance stand.
7. QA engineers perform smoke testing based on the checklist and automated tests for regression tests.
8. When the defect is checked, the task goes to the Closed status.
9. After that, specialists test the software on mobile devices and thoroughly analyze the page layout.
10. If there’s no defect with the Blocker status, the product can be moved to Preprod.
11. If everything is ok after tests, the product goes to the In production stage, and QA conducts some tests inside the real (commercial) environment.

To Sum Up

The Kanban methodology is a group of techniques for managing the process of software development and testing, and then purposefully optimizing them. Kanban adapts easily to existing systems. With its help, large and complex tasks can be divided into separate parts and performed more efficiently.