Ghouls and goblins, witches and demons - for one night only on Halloween, the streets are packed with spooktacular tricksters ready to scare anyone off their feet. However, in the world of software testing, fears and frights aren’t confined to one night each year. They're everywhere, lurking behind messy code or flaky tests. Bugs appear out of nowhere and can't be replicated, or deadly defects threaten to consume valiant efforts of software testers. So if not ghosts and monsters, what truly terrifies software testers? Let’s find out.
When Your Time (for Testing) is Up
Every tester knows the terror of testing the night before release. Whether your quality engineering team relies on manual testing, automated testing, or a hybrid approach, being assigned unreasonable testing schedules is a nightmare for software testers. Improving product velocity is important, but without enough time to test thoroughly, achieving a defect-free product is unreasonable and a tester cannot be held responsible for compromising release deadlines.
A Creeping Sense of The Unknown (Requirements)
Nothing scares a software tester more than unresponsive software or applications, or entering testing scenarios with no predefined software requirements. End-to-end tests, cross-browser tests, and API tests that work across devices, browsers, and operating systems are critical to the product's success in the hands of the end user. If testers find any discrepancies between these environments, the product or feature must be returned to development. Lastly, executing tests based on ambiguous requirements is detrimental to software success because the time spent by a software tester is likely to be redundant.
Haunted by Ghost (Bugs)
Few things scare software testers more than bugs that disappear into the night. Like the ghostly moaning that only happens on cool autumn nights when the moon is full, bugs that can only be identified by users or software testers in extremely specific circumstances can be deeply unsettling. Luckily, a little information goes a long way in solving these mysteries. Embracing test automation solutions that help your team provide context to discovered defects, whether through DOM screenshots, performance data for test steps, or Jira, Slack, or Teams integrations helps your team unmask mysterious ghost bugs.
Trapped in a (Testing) Time Warp
Every software tester understands the challenge of executing hundreds of repetitive tests. After a few rounds, it can feel like living the same day over and over again. Yet that’s the reality for many QA teams that solely rely on manual testing. This not only delays team deployments, but it is also exhausting for a software tester to repeat the same test hundreds or thousands of times each time the code changes slightly. But a time machine (or test automation platform) can break the cycle by helping software testers automate routine regression, UI, and end-to-end tests so that the proper timeline is restored. When software testers don’t focus on repetitive tasks, they gain valuable time to focus their energies on building effective tests and assuming leadership roles within their organizations.
Escape the Horror with Teamwork and Test Automation
Managing software quality is a difficult and frightening task. Despite high-quality code and superior test suites, bugs always find a way to spook testers and developers alike. A logical error, a low-probability bug with nuclear ramifications, and tight deadlines could all easily derail the project. Low-code test automation solutions such as mabl help quality engineering teams face their greatest fears by making test creation, maintenance, and management easier for testers with varying levels of coding experience.
Halloween happens only once a year but bugs spook testers all year round. See how mabl can ease your testing scaries with a free, two-week trial.
