How to manage situations when you have less time for Testing.

More often you find yourself constrained with time during testing phase, specifically when you are nearing the project release dates. With less time, obviously you have less number of options available with you and less number of scenarios that you can test and exercise. You need to see how you want to utilize this limited time available to conduct effective testing that allow you to find more issues. Some of the things that may help you overcome these situations are:

1. Time is Important - When you run into a challenge and you have very less time and lot many tests to perform, first thing that you need to do is calm down!! Believe me you don't want to lose precious time at this moment by taking stress. Hours and even minutes do matters in these situations. If you can keep you head cool then you can think more effectively and productively.
2. Be Positive - There will be situations you will be under tremendous pressure along with your team and most likely you are prone to dried up with extended hours of working. I would suggest you keep up the patience and try to be positive at this moment. Your motivation will not only charge you up but at the same time will have positive impact on other team members.
3. Team Work - Team work is like a phenomenon. You can't express it but only feel it being a part. At this moment try to see if you can help any of your team member and at the same time check if you can seek help from others. You need to be smart and sensitive at the same time and understand that you need not to put burdens on others as well.
4. Think from different contexts- Consider application from different contexts and perspectives e.g. business usage, usability, level of analysis, different conditions and behavior. Try to do end to end tests and then try to do various combinations of test data to get more coverage to the functionalities.
5. Perform exploratory testing (ET) - Instead of doing more of scripted testing, if feasible, conduct more of exploratory testing. While doing exploratory testing try to observe the behavior of other areas while testing a particular functionality. You will be able to covers multiple functionalities together and help you conduct testing in more efficient manner. Switching between various modes to be more assiduous and make you feel the work more interesting. Refer - Exploratory Testing Polarities
6. Work in sessions - Try to break down available time into small sessions. Conduct testing in sessions and then collate the results. Once you assess the results identify things needs to be tested in the session. For each session you should start with an identified list of tasks, so that you can focus on them one by one.
7. Conduct Impact assessment - Try to identify impacts based on recent changes done in code during the last build, you might need help from development team for this and need to collaborate. This will help you identify the changes and will help you focus on areas which are impacted and are most prone to error.
8. Risk-Based testing - You should focus more on modules which are high risk areas, have more defects (past data) and are fragile rather than over-testing the stable ones. This will certainly help you uncover most of the important defects. Refer here
9. Have fun - Even though it may sound incongruous here, but believe me when you are challenged and then delivers, those are the moments you remember for long time. These may become good memories for you, down the line. I do remember lot of instances from my projects in past where we were faced with various challenges but seldom remember instances where things were easy, though these are quite few in number :).