I am a Software QA Engineer and have came to new company as a first QA.
So far have 2.5 years experience with QA and QA lead on big and long term projects, but here in new company we have a lot of short terms projects as well (from a week long up to 6 months).
Can anyone share the best practices for approaching QA on projects like those since there is no time to implement whole QA process or even to do documentation for it.
I have an idea how to approach this but would like to hear some other experiences or read more about QA process on short projects if someone has something.
I think I know what you mean with implementing a QA process, but I will say this anyway. Even if the project is short and you test it in a different fashion than in the long term projects. You will apply some kind of process. So instead of say process or no process you need to figure out what process that you need to suite the project.
I like to break testing into different dimensions, then figure out which of these are important for you, and then design what tools you need to solve it best.
Some common and important dimensions:
Reporting - What and to whom for what reason
Tracability - To you need to prove what have been tested, what do you need to prove?
Partitioning - Do you need to share the work
Knowledge Transfer - How do you share knowledge and teach new people
Coverage - Tools that support you to figure out what you want to have done versus what you have done
Test Design - Tools the help you design tests
There are more, but these are ones which typically uses a documentation based approach which is what I read as your main concern.
We have roughly 3 months projects and have recently been working with this problem some tools that we use:
Testing Tours - For Partitioning and Test Design
Session Based Testing - For coverage and tracability
Pair Testing - For Test Design and Knowledge Transfer
Thank you very much for your input, will check the tools!
I came from being a QA Team Lead and first in department in a company which was building start-up projects from start to finish and each project was at least 2 years long with 3-8 developer team, to a company (also first in department) which has a lot of active projects at the same time (currently around 30 of them plus a lot more that are on maintenance) where each project is from few weeks long to 6 months which is pretty new environment for me so am just looking the best way to introduce my knowledge to short term projects since there is not the same budget or the same dynamic or the same timeline of projects.
Think about exploratory testing for very short projects
Try to save time on test management and allow more time for actual testing. e.g short concise tests, recorded evidences instead of screenshots attachments, tests in the form of bullet points/grids if possible (and if works for the project).
use automated tools wherever possible (e.g. zap for vulnerability scanning, online website testers for different screen sizes, online accessibility scanners, record and playback tools)
for automated tests use third party open source frameworks instead of trying to build your own. or use tools that are easy to start with (e.g. serenity, cypress, tosca)
Shift testing left and spend more time on requirement analysis. many hugs can be found before development.