Article by Amir Ghahrai
Quite often applications are deployed in live environments with defects which testers didn’t find during the testing phases. There are several reasons why defects end up in live environment. Here are some of them.
1 – Not understanding the requirement properly. Although this is quite unlikely (because application under test would have gone through several iterations of testing before being deployed in live) there are some requirements which testers misunderstand right from the beginning and continue to test under the false assumptions until go-live.
2 – Not testing with respect to the “live environment conditions”. During the last phase of testing, just before go-live, testing should be performed in an environment which very closely represents the live domains, these are in terms of hardware, performance related, use case workflows and integration with other 3rd party software.
3 – Testers not testing with the data similar to what users use in live domain. This is because during testing, it is impossible to test with every set of combination of data, so chances are when real users work with the application in live they enter some data that will manifest the defects in the system.
4 – Simply not testing some part of application. This could be due to time constraints that the management team wanted to get the application out the door quickly and the testing team did not have enough time to test the application thoroughly.
5 – The steps that testers follow can be different from the steps that users follow. Testers might have written a detailed test scripts with correct test steps according to how they think the application should work, but real users might ‘jump’ or take shortcuts from one step to another to reach a desired result. This is where State Transition Diagrams can help in identifying the possible workflows or paths through the application and testing to see what can be accessed at which point when transitioning from one state to another.
Can you think of any other reason why testers miss some defects that end up in live domains?
- Amir Ghahrai
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