Some best practices that contribute to improved software testing

There is always a serach for best practices going on. Some are well known and some hidden. Testing does not stand alone. It is intimately dependant on the development practices. These practices have come from many sources. These practices can be divided in three parts:
- Basic Practices
- Foundation Practices
- Incremental Practices

The basic practices are like training wheels which you need to get started and when you take them off, you know ow to ride. The basic practices include:

- Functional Specifications
It is basically a development activity but it is also necessary for software functional test. It defines the external view of an object or procedure. It helps the test generation activity to move in parallel with code development. It helps in the clarity from designer's and an architect perspective.
- Reviews and Inspections
Software reviews and inspection provides a ten times gain in debugging process.
- Formal entry and exit criteria
This practice offers a careful management of software development process. Every process step has a precise entry and exit criteria defined by development process and management keeps a track of the movement from one stage to another.
- Functional test varaitions
This practice involves understanding how to write variations which refers to combination of input condition to yield a output and gain coverage to thoroughly test the function.
- Multi platform testing
Today products run on different platforms so the necessity arises of designing and testing the product for different platforms. This practice addresses aspects of multi platform development and testing.
- Internal betas
Beta means the product is released to few customers and their feedback is recorded. This practice deals with beta programs to best levarage it and reduce cost of external beta.
- Automated test execution
Using automated test execution, the amount of manual work is minimized and higher coverage is gained. This is the best practice which is well understood in some areas. This practice needs to levarage and then develop methods for areas where automation is not fully done.
- Beta programs
- Nightly builds
Nightly build captures frequent builds from changes that being promoted. Advantages include firstly, errors are captured quickly if major regression occurs. Secondly, regression tests can run in background. Thirdly, newer releases of software are available to developers and testers sooner.