Product Release Testing

Independent product testing over release cycles involves careful dovetailing of the testing service with the product development plans. With its significant experience in testing software products, Trigent has developed a bouquet of test services to facilitate product testing.

Given below is an overview of the general elements of a product testing approach.

Product releases

Product releases are usually one of three types:

• Major release: Major product releases are characterized by addition of several new features and potentially disruptive change in the product capability. For example - moving from version 1 to version 2.
• Minor releases: These are incremental releases after a major release. This typically involves addition of a few new features and fixes for past bugs reported.
• Patch releases: These are considered as ‘emergency fixes’ which are specific for resolution of a critical bug or to address a specific customer’s critical needs.

Test methodology

Trigent has a ready bouquet of test services which can be applied based on the specific need as outlined below

Full blown tests:
A full set of product characteristics are validated. Typical capabilities tested are:

• Functional test of all application features
• Performance tests
• Compatibility tests – browser, platform etc.
• Other relevant tests such as Security tests, Usability tests etc.

What constitutes a full blown test cycle is determined in consultation with the client depending upon the product context.

In this test cycle, a significantly large set of test suites are executed and apart from test results and bug reports, the test team also produces test coverage metrics and utilizes test automation suites to accelerate completion of the test cycle.

Incremental tests:
Incremental tests focus on the areas where the product has undergone change. Typically incremental tests are characterized by

• Fully testing the newly introduced features
• Verifying bug fixes
• Running Regression tests

The test team studies the newly introduced features, prepared test plans and test suites and also does an impact analysis to identify impacted components that may need regression testing.

Spot tests:
Spot tests are otherwise treated as ‘emergency tests’ that need to be done immediately. This service is executed and completed within a few hours and at maximum within a day. The purpose is to ‘sanity’ check the product to detect potentially critical errors.

General Test activities

Apart from testing the product, the test team has a continuous stream of work in the background. Typically while not testing, the team is engaged in

• Understanding the Product features
• Designing test plans and test cases
• Building test automation suites and
• Collating and reporting test metrics

Visible benefits

Key benefits that this approach focuses on are:

• Enhanced stability and quality of the product in the market
• Predictable delivery schedules
• Reduction/elimination in regression issues from the market
• Reduction in overall product costs