When faced with tight deadlines, the urge to cut testing phases is strong. However, this significantly increases the risk of errors, lowers product quality, and ultimately drives up costs. While risk-based testing and automation can help mitigate some issues, they are no substitute for systematic and thorough testing at all. That's precisely why test management is crucial – to ensure quality remains a priority, even under pressure. Prioritizing realistic schedules and early testing is absolutely vital. Testing is not about finding bugs - it is about measuring quality. This entails test process and overall process optimization. You need to think differently about what testing does.

While facing time constraints but can't skip testing, here are some basic approaches we can follow : 1. Prioritise critical areas by testing on high risk and business critical functionalities. 2. Run existing unit, integration and regression tests to catch common issues without manual efforts. 3. An Unit testing can be done by developers before testing to be done by QA. 4. If possible, deploy changes behind feature flags so it can be tested in production with limited exposure before full roll-out.

Our approach should be based on the risk likelihood and risk impact of releasing improperly tested software. If all the components in the iteration are of high priority, we have to take a Breadth first approach. If we can evaluate and identify certain components are of high priority and some are of low priority, then we need to take a Depth first approach. Always share the test reports highlighting the components, their priority and the depth of testing done, and the risks of releasing the software, to the delivery team so that they can take a call. But first if the time constrained is expected, we need to review the iteration planning process and raise concerns. *Always be in a preventive mindset instead of rectifying mindset.*

Great topic! Time constraints are always a challenge in testing, but skipping testing phases is a risky shortcut. A few things that have worked well for me: -Risk-based testing – Prioritizing high-impact areas helps maximize coverage in limited time. -Automation – Regression tests run automatically free up time for exploratory testing. -Shift-left approach – Catching issues earlier (e.g., through peer reviews and static analysis) reduces late-stage surprises. -Exploratory testing – Even with tight deadlines, a structured exploratory approach can uncover critical issues fast. Balancing speed and quality is never easy, but a smart testing strategy ensures that deadlines don’t come at the cost of reliability.