What are the Benefits and Limitations of Pair Testing?

What is Pair testing?

Answer:

Pairwise testing is a practice where two team members are sitting together to test the software application on the same machine. The team members for pair testing can be a tester- developer, tester-tester, tester-business analyst.

The Outcome of Pair testing

• Test documentation
• Defect reports
• Session reports
• Shared knowledge

We can do pair testing with colleagues from my Scrum team on a regular basis. Some sessions are short, minutes to an hour, and some are longer, up to a day. Sometimes it is planned, and sometimes it’s spontaneous.

Why Pair testing?

Answer:

• A tester working alone may jump to incorrect conclusions
• Reduces the number of tests to be performed
• To test a specific area of functionality

Benefits of pair testing

• Combine testers from different technical backgrounds and hence being able to provide different perspectives and approaches to the test.
• Combine testers of different levels of experience
• More interactions with developers and management teams
• Faster bug identification and prevention
• Better feature usability can be achieved.
• Pair testing helps in identifying the negative flow in the functionality.
• It helps to improve better communication with the peers
• Pair testing helps to save time while testing.
• It is very helpful to train the peers who are working in the project.
• Pair Testing can not be done only by testers. It can also be done by Business analysts, Project Managers and Developers also can do.

When to do pair Testing?

When we working on an agile environment with 2 or 3 weeks sprint then pair testing will be really helpful to improve the quality of the application.

When there is a addition of new resources in the team then when doing pair testing helps to train the new comer

Tips to perform pair testing

• Focus on your testing areas like track down an elusive bug
• At the end of an iteration test the new functionality
• Prepare a "test-mission" by determining focus, scope and delimitations of the test
• Decide the session length

Challenges in pair testing

• Not easy to show management exactly what proportion of the tests have been performed
• You can write bug reports only when the session is over, which usually become a tedious task

When pairwise testing fails

• When you don't select the right values to test with
• When highly probable combinations get too little attention
• When you don't know the interdependencies between variables
• When input values to the system under test are not discrete
• To generate test ideas, especially between testers and developers, also to track down elusive defects
• To reduce the duplication of effort in testing
• A pair of experienced exploratory testers can detect important bugs more quickly

Conclusion:

Pairwise testing reduces the number of tests to be performed and at the same time improves the quality of the software product.