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I am working in a startup with a limited number of developers [4-5]. We work on all open source platforms like Java, jQuery, Springs for development of web based applications. For integration, we use Github.

Being the only tester, it is quite difficult to prepare a proper test plan for the team. Also we follow an agile process for development.

Please suggest to me what type of testing you would prefer: manual or automated?

I am looking forward to automated processes. Can you suggest which architecture is suitable for such a type of team & testing?

I would also welcome suggestions about unit testing, continue testing, functional, performance and load testing.

I need suggestions and direction with all your experience and efforts in this field. I am currently working with Selenium, Jmeter, BlazeMeter and Eclipse for testing but manual work seems more time-consuming. Development and testing should be managed properly and efficiently [proper time constraint].

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  • you are on right track , you are doing automation using selenium , java , eclipse. what is issue then? Apr 28, 2015 at 6:12
  • I am more concern about process,planning and framework Apr 28, 2015 at 6:25

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I hope your team understands that you cannot "assure" quality by testing - quality must be designed and coded in, and "A" in QA stands for "Assistance" - you can provide information what is current status of quality, if it improves or not, and suggestions how to improve your internal procedures to improve quality in the most effective way.

Also, for a startup, time to market is the most important metrics, if your customers are willing to tolerate some glitches (but not too many, because you are building also brand name recognition. If users dislike what they see, they may decide it is not worth, and will badmouth your product even later when quality improved.)

It will take you time to establish process and procedures for automated testing, so you will likely start with manual testing, and try to automate parts which makes most sense: takes most time, are used in multiple areas/paths, most straightforward.

In my experience, you unlikely will be able to write automated tests to all the features 4 developers are able to implement - so most of your time will be spent manual testing. It may even make sense to have separate manual tester (who needs to understand problem area, but not how to write the code) and developer of automated tests (who needs to be a coder, but does not require knowledge of all the libraries which code app uses). Different skillsets.

Unit tests should be written by person who knows tested unit the best - it's developer, as he writes unit's code (or even before coding, test first, as in test-driven development - google is your friend). Developers should also help you establish continuous integration process - always do only what causes most pain and has best return to time invested. Don't worry too much about architecture (just avoid obvious stupid mistakes), focus on speed to market.

Quality is team effort. But you (as coder for testing) can specialize on automated UI tests (because they require specialized knowledge, unrelated to knowledge of internal core libraries of your system as your developers need) and tools needed to improve the process.

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First of all in agile environment there should not be any question related to responsibility of QA work. You all guys are more or less equally responsible for testing. Where developers should take care of writing unit tests along with Automated UI tests. For my organization we are using Node.Js based UI testing tool (Protractor) so the developers are quite comfortable in writing UI tests along with their development tasks.

As you asked what kind of testing you should prefer, I'll say an ideal practice of testing should contain number of tests in following order:

Unit Test > Component Test > Integration Test > Automate GUI Test > Manual Test > E2E Test

You guys should concentrate more on writing unit tests for your application and manual work should be done only for smoke testing.

Framework: At the moment POM (Page object model) framework looks good for selenium UI test.

I'd like to recommend few urls where you can find better idea:

  1. Agile Practice
  2. Testing strategy for microservice
  3. Page Object
  4. Testing Pyramid

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