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Gap analysis is an extremely important tool for any team, and the discipline of QA is no exception. Despite its importance, many teams are guilty of not practicing gap analysis in their QA process, often due to a lack of confidence and understanding of how to conduct a gap analysis. However, it is a vital technique that is capable of helping your organization to achieve the growth you’re aiming for. So let’s dive right in.
What is Gap Analysis in QA?
In general, gap analysis is the practice of comparing the current state of your organization or team with the ideal outcome of where you want to be as an organization or team.
In the world of QA, gap analysis usually means comparing the observed results against the expected results of the QA process.
For example, you may have 4 hotfixes per month on average in your current state, and your goal is to have no more than two. Addressing this gap between the present and the targeted state is what gap analysis is all about. You need to assess the difference between the two states and determine what can be done to get you to where you want to be. Maybe it’s increasing test coverage in a particular area? Or improving the process in some way?
Explaining the Importance of Gap Analysis in QA
If you’re working in quality assurance, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re part of a broader engineering team that will need to understand why gap analysis is essential for the QA process and the whole organization.
- Identify and remove inefficiencies to eliminate wasted time
- Improve speed of test lifecycle
- Improve the quality of test lifecycle with more errors identified before release
- Fewer hotfixes after deployment
- Better documentation, fewer overlooked changes
- Higher quality test reports
By keeping this set of advantages in mind, you’ll be able to easily explain to others in your organization why it’s worth investing in gap analysis for QA in order to pursue the larger payoff in the end.
How to Do QA Gap Analysis
- First, define your ideal or expected outcome. Think about the practices that your QA team should be using, as well as if there are any tools that will help improve how your team operates. In addition, think about the key metrics and what they should be reflecting for your QA team.
- As you might expect, the next step is to inspect the current state of your QA process to contrast with the ideal state that you identified a step earlier. Is your team actually adhering to the prescribed QA processes correctly? What tools do you currently use, and do you use them effectively? What metrics do you currently have in place?
- Finally, design a solution. Now that you’ve understood where problems are occurring, formed a definition of where the QA process needs to be, and then compared to the current state of your QA process, you should be in a good position to come up with a plan to address any problems uncovered.
Get to the Ideal State with Codeless Testing
Codeless test automation brings multiple key solutions to address typical issues that many QA teams face daily. In particular, you might already know that testRigor is a champion in codeless testing. Let’s discuss how it can help you bring your testing processes to the next level:
Tighter Test Coverage
The first benefit is the speed of test creation. Automation frameworks are usually complex to implement, and tests take a long time to write. With testRigor, users are able to create tests 15x faster compared to other automation tools such as Selenium. There are numerous mechanisms allowing for that, involving extensive machine learning algorithms. This leads to QA teams being able to expand coverage much faster, resulting in better test coverage.
Fast Results and Ultra-Stable Tests
Not only you’re able to rapidly expand your test coverage, but you’ll also get test results much faster. Every time you run the whole test suite, you can expect to see the results in under an hour. Tests in testRigor are extremely stable, meaning they won’t fail because of things such as an accidental locator change.
Better Metrics
After each test run, you will enjoy the detailed metrics showcasing the current state. Direct integration with Jira makes it possible to create bug tickets with a simple click of a button and then track those issues to completion.
Fewer Hotfixes
As you might expect, this outcome results from the previous benefits we’ve just discussed. It becomes much easier to identify any bugs, identify them much sooner during the development process, and fix them in a timely manner. This drastically reduces the chances of issues missed during testing and reduces the number of hotfixes.
Conclusion
Hopefully, by now, you not only got a firm understanding of the main components of the QA gap analysis but also see why more companies are switching to codeless test automation to simplify and improve their QA processes and metrics. The whole team (not just QA engineers) becomes empowered to create, edit, and maintain automated tests that save you countless hours on every test run and deliver value to the business.
