Everyone who tried to improve his/her health started from healthy habits: playing a sport, following a diet, taking care of your body, etc.

Instant decisions such as taking diet pills or flaccid running on a track will make a situation better only for a short period of time but won’t help for the long term.

[highlight dark=”no”]The same case is with software testing.[/highlight]

It’s not enough to use the newest test management system or a modern framework: really qualitative software can be developed only with the help of useful testing habits.

Further, we’ll analyze the most popular of these habits so that you can use them.

A night test should be rechecked and all failures should be fixed

Some testers who work on automation sometimes create tests that are automatically launched at night.

And so the question arises: how many of them (tests) are then updated and launched once again?

All night runs are average tests: if most of them are executed correctly, we automatically suppose that everything is good and don’t touch unstable tests.

[highlight dark=”no”]This behavior is completely incorrect since you will never know that there are some issues.[/highlight]

If you are an automated tester and practice creating night tests, pay attention to their quality.

In the morning, recheck night runs and seek reasons for failures.

If you see false negative indicators in a certain test suite, fix them to make them stable.

You will eventually have a reliable test suite.

Unit tests should be launched in each build

We hope that developers of your product company develop unit tests for their software code.

[highlight dark=”no”]If unit tests are launched during each code commit, this can lead to positive feedback.[/highlight]

Integration tests are also useful since they can help the entire testing department track potential loss of response from the DB or API of an external command.

We recommend configuring the work of builds in the way that when each build is launched, unit tests and integration tests are launched too.

We ensure you that this method prevents you from doing unnecessary work – debugging of test scripts.

Security tests should be configured on a regular basis

Technical issues with web security can arise spontaneously.

[highlight dark=”no”]Monotonous scanning of software code[/highlight] is one of the methods to maintain security on a proper level.

You can find numerous paid and free tools on the Internet; they can be configured by users to be launched each day or used to create notifications on possible vulnerabilities that can appear.

Run load tests before a release

Are you absolutely sure that your application works well under load?

Since even the smallest change (such as adding external API) can affect its performance.

[highlight dark=”no”]It’s good to perform load testing always before new changes are made.[/highlight]

If the performance of a web product is bad, you should analyze this and make all necessary changes.

Ping your API on a regular basis

If the API that you use worked well yesterday, it doesn’t mean that this will happen tomorrow too.

Anything can cause issues with API.

For example, somebody has accidentally changed a brandmauer rule.

[highlight dark=”no”]It’s a good practice to establish ping testing for API.[/highlight]

You can use a special health check endpoint that will return positive and negative results or give a possibility to update GET requests.

Regardless of the method, you are using, you should configure the test to work once in several minutes so that it can inform a user that something went wrong.

Establish monitoring and a group of notifications

How do you think: how many errors could be avoided if your team received notifications about them beforehand?

Monitoring of notifications will help you to be aware of an issue when it’s not so serious and there is a chance to fix everything.

[highlight dark=”no”]Work on the logic and frequency of notifications together with your team[/highlight] and do everything to make more than one person responsible for communication.

Conclusion

To conclude, we’d like to admit that if you follow at least some of the testing habits described above, the quality of your software while providing QA consulting services will improve greatly.

Of course, it’s not so great as working with the latest testing tool but much cheaper and more efficient.