Importance of Software Testing Documentation

Software Testing Documentation

In today's testing, the projects which have all documents needs a high level of maturity. In this process, most companies do not give even a little importance to the documentation process as much as they give to the software development process. 

A project's documentation can make testing easy and systematic. Also it saves the organization's costs as well as time on that project. The lack of documentation can create a problem for acceptance of the product by the client.

For companies like Microsoft, their every product is launched with proper documentation. For example in the case of Office 2007 the product is launched with documentation that is very useful and explanatory. It is very easy for any user to understand how to use the product. So the documentation of a product is also one of the reasons for the success of the product.

In small organizations/companies there is always a problem that projects are rejected in a proposal phase or acceptance phase, it happens in the proposal phase due to a lack of documentation, the proposal can lack effective and expressive language to the client. Due to this the success of the organization suffers in the market.

This is not caused by the inability of small companies to deliver good quality projects but it is their inability to show their capability on a particular project.

Proper documentation is the only key thing that can make it possible and makes testing more accurate in an organization.

See the image below for a better understanding of the costs of various steps in a project:

The following are some of the points :

1. Clarify the project's objective and methods
2. Ensure the tasks and consistency of performance of a software
3. Internal co-ordination in client work should be there
4. Give feedback for preventive actions on the project
5. Also create some document for your quality management system's performance for a better testing process 
   

There are some important software testing documents that need to be used and maintained on a regular basis:

1. Test design document
2. Test case specification
3. Test Strategy
4. Test summary reports
5. Document of Weekly Status Report
6. User Documents
7. Document of User Acceptance Report
8. Report of Risk Assessment
9. Test Log document
10. Test plan document
11. Bug reports document
12. Test data document
    
13. Test analysis
     

Also, during testing a tester can refer to the following documents for better testing of a project:

Software requirement specifications and Functional documents