T Ashok @ash_thiru  on Twitter

Summary
SmartQA is a beautiful combination of thinking styles, a mindset of brilliance and minimalism,  tech prowess, heightened clarity and  great design and meaningful pauses, outlined as ten suggestions in this article.

#1 Embrace multiple thinking styles
Inculcate the deductive ability of a mathematician, creativity of an artist, mind of an engineer, value perception of a businessman, technical savviness, empathy, doggedness and nimbleness.

#2 Have a mindset of brilliant engineering
Step into end user’s shoes, architect/design robustly, inject code to aid testability, strive to test minimally, do test related tasks lightweight.

#3 Analyse well, exploit tools for doing
Much like the skill of a doctor to diagnose with exploiting the machines in the process. “Doing SmartQA”s a brilliant combination of “human powered and machine assisted” . The WHAT to-do is human while HOW-to-do is powered by machine/tools.

#4 Do minimally
Strive to prevent issues, embed testability, review code carefully, use smart checklists, write minimally, regress intelligently.

#5 See better, cover more, test less
Continuously see and assess product from multiple views – USERS, ATTRIBUTES, ENVIRONMENT, CODE, ENTITIES

#6 Pause to speed up
Periodically pause and analyse to be sure that you are staying on the right track, reflect on outcomes to ensure you are doing it right and efficiently.

#7 View system from multiple angles
View the system from internal, external, regulatory/compliance, operations, maintenance and release like code structure, architecture, technology, terms of behaviour, end users, environment, usage, standards.

#8 Be sensitive and aware
Be sensitive and aware to issues you encounter and potential causes of issues, after all issues creep in due to untold expectation, accidental omission, quiet assumptions, incorrect implementation,inappropriate modifications,interesting side effects ,deliberate abuse , and innovative usage.
Sharpen your senses  to smell better!

#9  Design for robustness 
Don’t just test, design system robustly. Codein firewallsto be disaffected by inputs, configuration/settings, resources or dependent code.

#10 Design for testability
Hook in code to be able to inject inputs to stimulate, check status, create traces/logs  to debug/check-for-correctness, even embed ‘self-test code’.

You may want to read a detailed version of these in these two articles FIVE thoughts on ‘Doing SmartQA’and FIVE *MORE* thoughts on ‘Doing SmartQA’.

(In this SmartBits, Shivaji Raju outlines “ Role of human intellect in QA“. The video is at the end of this blog)

Tools & technology certainly bring in a lot of efficiencies and improves user experience, but I believe that human intellect is definitely required for SmartQA. Let’s take an example of test coverage. We definitely require intellect to validate coverage to ensure that we have the optimal set of test cases. If we were to relate this to automation, we need intellect to ensure that we have an optimal distribution of test cases across different layers as tools would not be able to do it. We as a human or an engineer would validate what is a right fit, what is the right distribution between UI or services testing.

The second example is that we need human intelligence to devise strategies to build frameworks. When we build frameworks, usage of design patterns or best practices, human intellect is required. The third example is exploratory testing, where we uncover some really interesting defects in addition to the running the scripts.