Eliminate the Blind Spots in your Software Testing Process

Last updated on June 23rd, 2022 at 04:30 am

We often experience certain situations where reduced awareness leads to blind spots or failure to notice something that should have been visible since your attention lacks focus on a certain process. Similar to this notion in our daily lives, texters also face such blind spots when testing. QA testers can utilize bug management tools to make the most of their testing efforts, and pace up with issues that they have ignored unintentionally for a while. Let’s have a look at a few things testers and their managers can do to avoid these issues in testing processes:

Avoid Target Fixation 

When a human brain is overloaded with information regarding any phenomenon, it is natural that things may not go the way they should. It tends to focus on information that is the most important while avoiding unnecessary details. But sometimes, this hugely affects our focus on the particular task, that we miss out on other details in the surroundings. This is true for our daily activities as testers. How many times have you encountered a defect later in the software development process with the help of bug management tools, that you might have missed in the beginning, when testing teams were highly focused on improving a single feature only. 

For instance, when you are browsing through a website to look at the layouts that must match the provided outline. While you are doing that, there are chances that you may miss any of the following:

• The homepage of a website should be replaced with a new logo of the company
• The login box has the username and password fields but you have failed to add the login button
• The URL structure is working fine but URLs are named incorrectly

These are major problems and it is very common for testers to miss them when they tend to focus on only the key features/upgrades. They are often missed due to target fixation.

Testers Often Overlook Information

Testers execute tests that have predefined steps along with their expected results, thus, they overlook anything that is not defined and only match the results for what they are focusing on. The tester’s mind becomes immune to look for specific errors, while they may miss out on other defects, even if the information may be right in front of them.

Overcoming Inattentional Blindness

This is a concept that poses a great challenge for software testers. It is important to look for ways to overcome inattentional blindness by analyzing the tests in different ways that can make the process more effective. 

Practice Pair Testing 

It is general psychology that two people think differently at some level, and practising their pair testing can be one solution to overcome inattentional blindness. One tester can point out what the other may have missed, and then discuss necessary details later. It can even prove to be a good learning exercise for teams who use bug management tools for bug tracking.