Essential Software Testing Checklist for Quality Assurance

This article consists of various testing checklists for testing different software applications.

What is a Testing Checklist?

A Checklist is a collection of items/tasks documented for tracking purposes. This list could be organised in a particular sequence or haphazardly. The testing checklist serves as a reference document to ensure that all critical aspects have been considered.

Why Checklist is Important?

1. Comprehensive Coverage: A testing checklist guarantees that all relevant test scenarios, functionalities, or test cases have been considered. It enables testers to cover a wide range of testing elements, including functional, performance, security, usability, and compatibility, assuring thorough test coverage.

2. Consistency: A checklist encourages consistency in the testing process. It helps in ensuring that all testing operations are executed effectively across different modules or components of a system. Consistency is necessary for repeatable and accurate testing results.

3. Standardization: Checklists provide a standardized approach to testing. Checklists consist of Guidelines that testers should follow to maintain uniformity.

4. Time and Resource Efficiency: A checklist helps testers save time by providing a predefined list of tasks to follow. It prevents them from missing important steps, resulting in more efficient testing. It also helps allocate testing resources effectively, ensuring that no crucial areas are neglected.

Types of Testing Checklist

Some of the basic testing checklists are defined below. These can be used as a basic guideline template.

Web Application Testing Checklist

1. Gather and understand all functional requirements.
2. Identify Test inputs and expected outcomes.
3. Validate all the features and their outcomes as per the requirements.
4. Validate the Error prompts and messages. Check for warning and error colour code schemes.
5. Verify applications’ compatibility across different browsers, devices and different operating systems.
6. Verify the application’s user-friendliness and navigation across the website.
7. Check Applications Font, Text is uniform across different pages or as per mockups/documents.
8. Check the application communicates well with different servers when performing any operations like sending information, or fetching some data.
9. Validate application performance, and check response time, throughput, and page load time.
10. Conduct load testing to assess the system’s behaviour under expected and peak loads.
11. Check for secure transmission of sensitive data, such as encryption protocols and SSL certificates.
12. Validate the logo and image’s resolution, alignment, and size.
13. Validate hyperlinks, action buttons, and form submissions.
14. Validate data exchange scenarios of application, check data stored correctly and retrieved correctly from CMS, APIs or database.

Mobile application Checklist

1. Check for different devices. Different Android/IOS Versions. Validate cross-platform compatibility.
2. Check for different screen resolutions.
3. Check applications under different conditions and different environments. For Example check for High network availability and low network availability conditions. Check application under strong signal strength and weak signal strength.
4. Validate the UI of the application thoroughly. Verify that all buttons, links, and interactive elements work as intended.
5. Validate that the app can be installed, uninstalled, reinstalled and upgraded successfully.
6. Test the application’s navigation flow and ensure smooth transitions between screens.
7. Check for integration with third-party apps if supported like social media apps.
8. Validate the app’s functioning with the device’s native apps like camera and storage.
9. Verify the app’s functionality for push notifications if any.
10. Check the application for memory consumption and power consumption.
11. Verify the behaviour of the non-text elements such as Images, charts, graphs, audio/video content, etc.
12. Validate the scrolling and swiping functionality of the mobile application.
13. Verify application behaviour if the screen is locked or unlocked.
14. Validate for the backward compatibility of the application.
15. Validate the performance of the application under various conditions the app is active, running in the background, the device is charging etc.
16. Validate the launch time of the application.
17. Verify the app’s performance under different networks like 3G/4G/5G etc.
18. Monitor resource usage (CPU, memory, battery) to identify any performance bottlenecks.
19. Perform Load testing to validate the behaviour of the application during peak user loads.
20. Validate if the application adheres to privacy regulations and handles user data appropriately.
21. Check the application for brute force attacks and security vulnerabilities.
22. Check application functionality for Interruption testing.

What is Backward Compatibility?

Backward compatibility testing is used to ensure that the newer version of the application works seamlessly and without any issues with new software or hardware. For example, if a user upgraded his device from Android version 13 to 14 then apps installed in his phone should be working correctly.

What is Interruption testing in Mobile?

interruption testing is a type of testing that is performed to ensure an application/software’s ability to handle interruptions without any failure. For example how an application behaves when it is interrupted by another action like receiving a phone call, using meeting apps, shut down of a device, network loss etc.

Conclusion: It’s important to adapt and expand the checklist to cover any additional functionalities or specific testing needs that are relevant to your application. I will keep on adding and modifying the testing checklist and verification points to this article. Read this article for the API testing checklist.