Why Are Software Testing Reports So Complicated?
Software Testing Reports can be overwhelming data dumps. There has to be another way.
Software Testing Reports have become unfocused and overly dense data dumps that confuse many project managers, portfolio managers, and organizations.
Software Testing Reports have become unfocused and overly dense data dumps that confuse many project managers, portfolio managers, and organizations.
Has this ever happened to you? You hire an organization to create a software solution for your business. They create and install this solution. To roll out the software, you conduct a test. That test produces a report, which the contractor then sends to you for analysis.
You need to know if the newly created software is working, or coming up short in critical areas. From this report, you’ll make decisions on deploying the software or working to fix bugs.
The only problem is, you can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s just pages and pages of numbers. After all, if you understood dense software data and analysis…chances are you would have probably created the solution, in house.
So, you ask the contractor what it means. Welcome to yet another conflict-of-interest. You must rely on the contractor (who you’re paying) to explain how well of a job they did.
Software Testing Reports Cause Serious Problems
Software acceptance testing reports play a critical role in catching problematic defects in software before deployment across the organization occurs. However, people that need to review them don’t always have the technical background required to parse dense information.
As discussed previously, modern software testing is exceedingly complex, requiring a high level of sophistication. It would seem reasonable to assume that reports that result from testing would be equally impenetrable. But, there is a real danger in receiving overly complicated, dense, and unfocussed software testing reporting.
Testing vets the quality of the software’s code. It measures the adequacy of its security features and its functionality, deployability, maintainability, and performance. Acceptance testing catches issues while they’re still easy to repair. After software deployment, it becomes far more costly and complicated to fix any problems that occur.
If decisionmakers can’t pull critical insights from these reports, which are often little more than massive data dumps, the documents risk undoing the purpose of their creation. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
A Suite of Problems Across an Organization
Apart from the problem of reporting being overly complicated for project managers who lack modern software expertise, there’s also a litany of breakdowns and issues that telescope when reports are unnecessarily complicated.
For example, overly-complex reports become unsharable. When project managers try to disseminate insights to colleagues who also lack technical expertise, there’s a breakdown of communication. Without a fundamental understanding of the concerns raised by the report, it’s unlikely that colleagues will comprehend the report.
Fundamental misunderstandings are possible when testing documents don’t distill the information down to meaningful insights. When there’s no acceptance gate or success threshold defined, it’s unclear what is needed to achieve a passing grade. The software may have failed some critical measures, but the deficiency stays hidden in the noise.
Similar problems appear when the data isn’t weighted to favor the metrics most critical to success. Unimportant issues may receive too much focus while major failings in other areas may appear less consequential.
“Data dump” reports also don’t offer guidance to decision-makers regarding the next steps for addressing noted deficiencies. It’s left to the team to determine how to address critical issues, and as stated earlier, staff members may not understand the report well enough to make that determination.
These problems don’t admit easy answers if the decision-makers involved continue to receive convoluted, cumbersome testing reports. What’s needed is a significant improvement in the quality of these crucial documents.
TE|ST Provides the Solution
Having years and years of experience under its belt executing software testing, and acceptance testing, Tactical Edge has seen all the problems associated with software testing. That’s why we’ve launched, Tactical Edge Strategic Testing (TE|ST), an independent, unbiased, software testing service executed by their team of modern software experts.
TE|ST solves the conflicts of interest created when software contractors test their solutions. TE|ST provides an end-to-end view of solutions, and are customized to fit a program’s requirements.
The area that TE|ST shines is in its software testing reports. We deliver clear, easy-to-understand reports with transparent metrics and actionable directives for remedying any problems we uncover. Our testing methodologies are standardized and proven, which means you can trust the insights you receive.
Our holistic analysis takes into account code quality, security, cloud readiness, deployability, and more. We then apply custom weighting to factor in your priorities and goals, ensuring that our testing focuses on the most critical elements to the software’s success.
When we conclude testing, we won’t hand you 30 pages of unfiltered data and wish you luck. TE|ST reports are normalized into a concise, unified, 2-3 page aggregate report that makes it easy to read current states and trends. The testing results are summarized into a weighted spider graph that provides a clear picture of how it performed across all of our focus areas.
You won’t be left to decode your software’s performance from pages of raw data. Our reports provide an unambiguous pass/fail gate with defined objectives and actionable next steps for addressing deficiencies.
Tactical Edge Strategic Testing is the best choice in the industry for software testing. We take our position as experts very seriously. We offer the most rigorous testing available, and we make sure that you precisely understand how your software did and where you should look to fix any issues. It’s software testing done right with, most importantly, reporting communicated clearly.