Why Documentation is Important in Software Testing?

Software testing is an essential portion of Software Development Life Cycle. In current’s testing process, project requires planned and serialized documentation for testing and development. Because of this most of companies concentrate on creating documentation of software development process.

Proper documentation is the only key thing that can make it possible and makes testing more accurate in an organization. A project’s documentation makes testing process easy and organized, also saves company money and time spent on that project. Proper documentation makes easy for the client to review the software process.

Fact is that, careful documentation can save an organization’s time, efforts and money. For any bigger company, like; Microsoft, adobe, oracle, TCS etc.., there product or software successfully get releases with their proper documentation that makes easy for any user to understand the product. So that proper documentation has become major reason of software development.

Documentation is a most vital portion of a software product’s achievement and efficiency. Poor documentation affects the quality of software or application. The IEEE Standard for Software Test Documentation (IEEE829-98) provides a clear description of their testing document and their relation with other document and functions with the testing procedure. Software testing documentation helps in estimating the testing energy required, test coverage, condition tracking/tracing etc.

There are numbers of vital software quality assurance documents provided by IEEE Standard which is to be used and maintained in regular basis to the success of the project:

• Test design document
• Test case specification
• Test Procedure Specification
• Test Strategy
• Test summary reports
• Test Log document
• Test plan document
• Bug reports document
• Test data document
• Document of Weekly Status Report
• User Documents
• Document of User Acceptance Report
• Test Incident or Problem Report
• Report of Risk Assessment
• Test analysis

Standard sample testing templates should be there for all types of documentation like; Test strategy, test Plan, Test cases, and Test data to Bug report. These sample testing documents should follow some standards like CMMI, ISO etc. Needs of these documents are to synchronize quality process of testing software in an organization. An experience tester should be there to understand all kind of documents, project domain, objective, and technology. Documentation is also very useful in the case of automation testing or software performance testing.

A very important thing, Documentation keeps step-by-step processing record and result record which we keep as a reference material. A project that is fine documented has higher level of maturity and is more successful as compared to the un-documented project. Proper documentation is the only key point that can make it possible and makes testing more accurate in an organization

Figure below shows the cost involved in the software development life cycle.

Some important point to be noted at the time of doing project

• The project’s objective and methods should be very clear
• Good understanding should be there with clients
• Present feedback for preventive actions on the project
• Guarantee that the project performance should be consistent and accurate

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What other documents do you maintain in your daily testing activities? Share below in comments.