…and going live with a newly updated software is scary. More often than not we think that everything should work out fine, but are not completely sure.

So before Go Live we often question ourselves whether or not our software is sufficiently tested or not. How many bugs will we face after Go Live and what surprises are waiting behind that barrier. In this Blog I want to share my experience about what aspects need to be taken into account to introduce a good (perfect being unreachable) software testing process.

I will talk about three main topics

• Organizations: Whether we are working in a classical setup (waterfall, V-Model), in an agile setup or a totally different setup has a huge influence on our delivery. Every setup aims to tackle certain problems and opens up another set of problems. Crucially the question for me always is: When we work agile the dev team is responsible for quality – but where are the tests and do we still need testers?
• Change: Whatever is holding us back from delivering high quality software quickly needs to be changed. What I have experienced, is that change is often perceived as a bad thing and a big bang change process is often preferred to incremental steps. In my opinion most organizations are changing so often and rapidly, that employees are quite understandably getting tired of it. For me, improving in increments is the way to go.
• Tools: What tools help us to ensure a strong software testing process and enable us to write efficient and effective tests (as few as possible) that cover as much as possible of our functionality. And how can we track our test results so as to keep improving over time.