Test Reviews - An efficient way to validate test coverage

When the complexity of testing increases, deriving test scenarios becomes extremely hard. Individual testers are not always capable of thinking all aspects of the products and finding out test cases. In agile processes which demands frequent releases, this becomes much harder since individual testers do not get sufficient time to learn and explore products.

At WSO2, code reviews have been an integral part of engineering process. Code review groups get together and go through different code segments in weekly basis.

Similar to code reviews, WSO2 QA team conducts weekly test reviews. The primary objective of reviewing tests is to finding out gaps in a particular product's testing methodology.

Usually there are 2 main actors take part in a test review meeting.

- Tester(s) who test a particular feature

- Developer (s) who implemented the feature

Tester goes through the existing test scenarios and developer provides his or her feedback on the tests. Specially when a particular use case is not clear enough, tester can clarify it during reviews very effective manner.

It is the testers responsibility to try out the new test scenarios which have been captured during the review in next release cycles.

Test review will not take more than 1 hour and testers should be prepared properly to get the maximum out of this short time and capture more and more test scenarios.

Similar to the manual test scenarios, all automated tests can also be reviewed during test reviews.

In agile processes where you do not have detailed system specs to derive tests, test reviews are one of the most useful mechanisms to validate your test coverage.