With the rapid advancement of digitization and cutting-edge technologies, modern IT products are becoming increasingly complex. Open banking systems, eCommerce platforms, CRMs, ERPs, CMSs, AR/VR-based games, dApps, and virtual fitting rooms are all marked by intricate business logic, multifaceted architectures, numerous dependencies, integrations, and even the incorporation of big data. These products often include sophisticated features, such as biometric authentication. For example, virtual fitting rooms may offer 3D body scanning, augmented reality integration, fabric simulation, size recommendation engines, and virtual try-on capabilities, enhancing the online shopping experience.

Ensuring their failsafe operation is also becoming more challenging. Sporadic or chaotic testing activities can only aggravate a situation and cause insufficient test coverage, issues slipping into the production environment, missed deadlines, and even increased costs because of rework.

Luckily, these can be mitigated with full-cycle testing. But how to ensure its effectiveness and efficiency? In this article, we provide a closer look on this concept, its ubiquitous obstacles, and approaches for surmounting them.

The what, when, and why of full-cycle testing

Full-cycle testing can be characterized as an all-encompassing QA approach that starts from the early phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and continues through post-release support. This continuous, holistic testing process consists of the following essential, sequential activities: delving into requirements, planning, preparing a test approach or creating a test plan, creating a test model, developing test cases (including automated scripts), generating high-quality test data, setting up environments, conducting tests, creating reports, and post-release monitoring.

Companies should consider implementing Full cycle testing in several scenarios. Complex IT products that possess various integrations and rapidly accrete new components should be continuously verified to prevent new defects and crashes. Ongoing releases also require regular QA supervision to ensure they operate as intended. Full cycle testing is also a good choice when organizations need to make sure their software complies with regulatory demands. Finally, development projects that span for years and incorporate legacy code should also be supported with QA.

When applied correctly, full cycle testing provides multiple benefits to project teams, allowing them to significantly extend test coverage, find errors early, improve software quality, and minimize the chances of rework. In addition, when IT products operate like clockwork, end users will probably like them and may even advertise it by word-of-mouth recommendations.

Full-cycle testing challenges: things aren’t always simple

Testing is a momentous step vital for ensuring correct software operation. However, project teams can confront QA challenges that may complicate reaching set objectives. It’s important to be aware of them and know how to address them with a well-tuned test strategy.

Pressing deadlines

Almost half of all respondents of the latest report stated that the shortage of time has become one of the key problems when ensuring software quality. We all understand that meeting milestones is hardly possible without sticking to a set schedule. However, when QA engineers follow a tight release timetable and perform a myriad of tasks in no time, of course, software quality can be compromised, and overtime can become QA engineers' constant companion.

Poor interaction

There's a risk that when collaboration between QA engineers, software developers, business analysts, and other stakeholders is insufficient—particularly in globally distributed teams—the work environment can become unstable, and confusion may arise. This can slow down decision-making and compromise the quality of work. To mitigate these risks, it's important to adopt clear communication strategies and utilize collaboration tools that facilitate thorough discussion and planning of software requirements, potential challenges, and user journeys. By ensuring effective coordination, teams can maintain project stability and deliver high-quality outcomes, regardless of team location.

Shortage of experts

The ratio of QA engineers to software developers is of high importance, if an imbalance occurs, risks related to small test coverage may arise, leading to late identification of defects, security vulnerabilities, software inability to cope with high loads, and other problems that can negatively affect end-user experience.

Issues with requirements

Vague, missing, or constantly changing requirements introduce significant complexity, as QA engineers rely on them as the foundation for planning the scope of work and defining necessary activities. When requirements are unclear or unstable, project teams may end up with incomplete test cases, which can lead to issues in the production environment.

Continuous technological upgrade

IT ecosystems are changing at a fast pace. State-of-the-art development solutions, such as frameworks, libraries, or tools, appear quite often. It means that if QA engineers don’t upgrade their competencies and QA techniques on an ongoing basis, they likely won’t manage to ensure efficient quality control activities and may skip critical or major issues.

Incorrect priorities

Prioritizing test cases based on the criticality of features for business success is crucial in any software development project. This ensures that key functionalities, such as payment processing and product catalogs in eCommerce solutions or billing, service activation, and bandwidth management in telecom software, operate as required. If priorities are incorrectly defined, there is a risk of unoptimized testing efforts, which can lead to insufficient focus on the most critical areas, potentially compromising the overall quality and reliability of the product.

Problems with test environments

QA engineers are responsible for properly setting up testing environments, ensuring they closely resemble the production environment to the greatest extent possible, and contributing to their stability. Working with test data is another essential activity—in fact, according to the World Quality Report 2023-2024 (WQR), 69% of organizations are working on implementing a company-wide test data provisioning strategy. QA specialists must adopt a specific approach to ensure that the data used is relevant, diverse, complete, and protected. Without effective management of these activities, there is a risk of invalid testing outcomes, which can affect the software's quality.

Small test coverage

Regardless of the type of software testing, test coverage is one of the most crucial aspects that QA engineers must focus on. It represents the extent of code covered by various QA verifications, serving as a key indicator of overall IT product quality. When test coverage is insufficient, the risk of undetected issues increases, leading to potential problems in production and higher maintenance costs. Therefore, ensuring adequate test coverage is essential to minimizing risks and maintaining software quality.

Low effectiveness of automated workflows

Test automation serves as a powerful tool to improve the capabilities of manual QA engineers. The WQR interviewees stated that it helps minimize risks (54%), boost test efficiency (52%), decrease the number of live defects (51%), and speed up time to market (42%). Its improper introduction or ineffectiveness can cause issues with stability and further maintenance.

QA solutions to surmount full-cycle testing challenges

Considering above-mentioned risks, it’s a good idea to understand how they can be mitigated by testing best practices.

1. Ensure productive communication

The success of any activity involving more than two people relies heavily on open and effective communication, particularly in software development projects where QA engineers, developers, business analysts, product owners, and other stakeholders work together as distributed teams to release robust IT products.

Establishing stable interaction channels for both synchronous and asynchronous communication is crucial, along with introducing tools that facilitate transparent and easy monitoring of all project activities. Regular team meetings are also essential to discuss questions, progress, and problems, ensuring that everyone is informed about relevant project aspects and milestones. Team members should practice active listening, maintain respectful behavior, and work to prevent escalation, especially during conflicts, to foster a collaborative and productive environment.

2. Improve requirements-related processes

To ensure consistent test cases and prevent defects in the production environment, it's crucial that requirements are always complete and up to date. QA engineers should actively clarify any ambiguities with other team members and promptly update test documentation as changes arise. While documenting the requirements is primarily the responsibility of business analysts, QA specialists play a critical role in analyzing the impact of any changes or omissions in the requirements. They must assess how these changes affect the software and the existing test cases, ensuring that test documentation is accurately adjusted to reflect the current state of the project..

3. Decide what tests to execute first

QA managers should apply several critical practices to prioritize testing effectively. First, they need to analyze existing requirements and create a traceability matrix to ensure each requirement is covered by one or more test cases. Based on the criticality of the requirements to the business, managers can then decide which cases should be executed first. Regular meetings should be held to reassess priorities, especially if there are changes to the requirements, ensuring that testing efforts remain aligned with project goals.

4. Cultivate a culture of continuous education

Even if a company faces temporary constraints in hiring new project team members, it can still invest in improving the skills of its existing staff. Beyond smart prioritization of test cases and enhancing test automation, companies can focus on upskilling their current resources. By offering practical-oriented courses, facilitating knowledge transfer, and establishing Centers of Excellence (CoEs) and Research and Development (R&D) initiatives, companies can significantly boost the efficiency of their QA engineers and overall project outcomes.

5. Introduce continuous testing (CT)

Continuous Testing (CT) is essential for minimizing challenges in full-cycle testing CT ensures ongoing, early, and automated testing throughout the entire SDLC. This approach enables QA engineers to increase test coverage, identify issues of varying severity earlier, and reduce the risk of defects in the production environment. CT also provides continuous feedback on software quality, helping to make timely improvements and increasing the velocity of the testing process, which contributes to meeting quality gates on time.

6. Consider agile testing approaches

Unlike the Waterfall model, where testing is conducted near the end of the development cycle, Agile emphasizes continuous quality assurance activities throughout the process. Agile testing involves close and open communication among all project members, high flexibility to adapt to changing conditions, and a focus on customer needs. By adopting Agile testing approaches, QA engineers can enhance team collaboration, test software in parallel with development, manage evolving requirements more effectively, and reduce the risk of software issues.

7. Boost capabilities of automated workflows

To ensure the effective adoption of test automation and achieve reliable results, QA engineers should carefully identify which tests are best suited for automation, such as regression, performance, and cybersecurity tests that require frequent execution. They should prioritize the scope of automation and consider both functional and non-functional requirements to maximize test coverage. Additionally, ensuring the stability of test environments and selecting a toolkit that aligns with the team's competencies and project specifics are crucial. As software functionality expands over time, it’s advisable to write short, independent automated scripts and regularly update them to facilitate more effective maintenance.

Closing thoughts

Although full-cycle testing provides various benefits, such as sped up time to market, minimized chances of production defects, early identification of issues, or lessened probability of rework, QA teams can still confront challenges, impeding its effectiveness.

To successfully overcome them, companies can introduce CT and Agile testing, improve test automation effectiveness, establish a communication framework, ensure high quality of requirements, prioritize test cases, and stick to continuous learning.