by admin | Sep 14, 2019 | Software Testing, Fixed, Blog |
More and more industries and companies are running on software today. Most of the suppliers we subscribe to deliver their goods via online digital products and services. As an engineer in the trenches, you can see how software is consuming more and more, and why our jobs as testers are more important than ever. It’s up to us as testers to keep pace with the rapid growth. We are the quality champions and leaders of our software.
As teams push harder and faster to get features into the hands of our customers, we are the last line of defense for educating our team to potential unseen consequences of our development decisions. The digital testing landscape is changing fast, and in this article, we will see how Continuous Testing helps us to deliver quality products.
Agile
In the pre-agile model, which is the classic software development Waterfall model, testers only began testing once the software requirements and development were complete, and we as testers had limited inputs and insights. It was basically a world full of silos.
Agile broke those silos down and brought everyone together as one team. That change was a significant one because it meant teams could work for years on a project without speaking or getting any feedback from their users. As you might imagine, resolving issues found in production were almost impossible to resolve, and fixing deep-seated architectural issues with the software required spending a great deal of time and money. Agile was the first wave of modern software development that addressed the issues presented in the Waterfall development approach.
DevOps
Once Agile took root, the second wave — DevOps began to appear. Again, it took some time for it to gain acceptance, but it ultimately caught on even faster than Agile. DevOps gave birth to the collaboration between software development and software operations, creating practices like continuous integration and delivery to provide services and products at high velocity. This approach creates a mechanism that allows us to quickly get our products into the hands of our users, which means quicker feedback in order to determine whether it’s delivering the value we’ve promised. Like Agile did before it, DevOps broke down even more silos between teams merging software operations with the rest of the team.
Continuous Testing- Current State of Testing
The best definition of Continuous testing is the ability to instantly access the risk of a new release or change before it impacts customers. You want to identify unexpected behaviors as soon as they are introduced. The sooner you find or prevent bugs, the easier and cheaper they are to fix. This approach is often accomplished by executing automated tests that probe the quality of the software during each stage of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The mantra of continuous testing is “test early, test often, and test everywhere in an automated fashion.” Testing begins not after everything is completed but from the start. Each step along the way serves as a quality gate, baking in excellence at each stage of the SDLC pipeline.
Now with continuous testing, we’re not only running tests in an automated fashion using the same tools and languages as the developers (and leveraging open-source libraries), but we’re doing them continually all the way through into production– beginning with development. We’re not waiting until the end like in the old “waterfall” days. It’s important to remember that continuous testing is not just about end-to-end, UI test automation. With the need to quickly release software, we can no longer rely on manual and automated UI testing only. When we talk about automation in the context of continuous testing, it’s the process of automating any manual task that is slowing down the process. It doesn’t need to be a “test.” For example, before my team could do continuous integration, we needed to have an automated deploy job for our software. Having folks manually install the latest build on the nightly automated test environment was not a scalable solution. These types of tasks are critical and need to be automated.
CI Process
A typical continuous testing process consists of seven key elements: Develop, Build, Test, Report, Release, Monitor, & Repeat. Ultimately, the process starts with testing the quality of the feature. A recent study tells that 64% percent of total defect costs are due to errors in the requirements and design phases of the SDLC. So you must be careful before you start the development, you should ask these – Is it really what our customer wants? Has your team cleared up any confusion or misunderstandings before coding even starts? Getting clear on what it is you are trying to deliver to the customer can find bugs before a line of code is ever written! This is one reason some teams use acceptance criteria practices like Behavior Driven Development to help drive this communication and test the team’s assumption against what their customers really want.
Once the team agrees on what it is they are developing, testing approaches like TDD should drive the process and let you know if your code actually meets your business objectives. Code that is checked into your continuous integration process needs to be probed for quality. Automated style checks, security, performance and unit tests, automatic tests on check-in with a required pass/fail ratio needed before promotion to production, etc., will ensure that broken code is not promoted to production.
With continuous integration, your developers need to make their code testable. If you want to write test automation for your code, you need to be able to separate it into individual pieces. The secret is to build small things that can be combined into larger things. The best way to build small things is to have a good test suite around the small things, so that when you combine them into the bigger things you have to write less tests on the bigger thing first off; it’s also easier to test the bigger things because you already have guarantees about how the smaller things work. You don’t want to write code just for testing. You want to write code that is testable but doesn’t do any more than is needed. What it often comes down to is breaking these things down into smaller pieces, and testing the individual pieces.
by admin | Oct 1, 2019 | Software Testing, Fixed, Blog |
While software testing is extremely critical to ensure a top quality product, there are certain activities required before undertaking testing. Some of these steps are boring and challenging, but as a leading software testing company, we endorse the conducting of these activities. For a software product to meet and exceed business and technical requirements, pre-testing and testing activities are essential. Testing software is not only about finding and fixing bugs – it is a whole gamut of activities, and hence requires intense and meticulous planning. There are certain activities recommended as part of this planning, which would help any tester to conduct in-depth and focused software testing.
Remember there is always documentation from earlier testingDocumentation is an essential portion of testing and every experienced tester would prepare a set of documents capturing the series of events in a testing exercise. To become an expert tester, it is imperative to first read the set of documents to better grasp the system being tested. Codoid as an expert QA company prepares detailed documentation, and also recommends that every newbie tester goes through the documentation at their disposal before embarking on the testing journey. Reading the documents helps to ask the right questions and prepare a case for the team lead enlisting their understanding of the requirements from the testing exercise. Yes, we agree this task is possibly one of the most mundane and onerous ones, but is indispensable to the success of testing regimes. The truth is the greater the understanding of the system being tested, the easier it would be to test and find and fix bugs.
Time to Script your Test
Equipped with the knowledge got from the test documentation, testers are better equipped to write a detailed test case. The good part of being ‘fresh on the testing scene’ is that there would be an experienced tester/reviewer taking a good look at the test case created. The reviewer would be able to point out the great and not so good parts of the test, which would help to rewrite the portions that need tweaking. This too is a great learning opportunity however cumbersome and challenging it may appear at first.
Dive into Regression Testing ActivitiesPost creating a test, it is imperative to re-run previously written test cases – we are certain to conduct these regression testing activities, even as software testing experts. The reason this activity is so important is that it helps tests understand that certain functions may be altered, and hence the tests scripted by them would not be accurate. It would be necessary to go back ‘to the drawing board’ and script fresh tests to match the current functionalities within the system. We as a top software testing company reiterate that this activity is not fun, but is definitely not one that can be ignored.
Next is Exploratory TestingAs experienced software testers, we can safely say that this is one of the more interesting testing activities! This form of pre-testing activity allows you to use your enthusiasm and skills to assess and imagine the various scenarios of use by customers and the possible things that could go awry. It is vital to allocate sufficient time for this activity – fun and necessary.
Caught the Bug With all the efforts expended by testers, bug will soon come to the fore and be uncovered. This is a really fun activity, since here is when fixing them puts all the skills of a tester into practice. However, while this may be an interesting activity, it is no mean task and must be handled with dexterity since it is critical to success.
In Conclusion:
Post all the activities mentioned, lastly it would be necessary for all those involved to meet and discuss the findings, solutions, the testing strategy, and reporting of the details in a meticulously drafted document. As a new tester these tips will help to gain better control of the actual testing of a system. We at Codoid are highly experienced in all realms of software testing – pre, during, and post, and this is a way of sharing our expertise with fresh testers. For businesses, connect with us to leverage our skills in a wide range of activities and testing requirements.
by admin | Sep 20, 2019 | Software Testing, Fixed, Blog |
It is important to recognize that software quality improvement, like software development, is an iterative process. There is no need to accomplish everything within a single step; improvement can be accomplished in incremental steps. Even small changes can make a tangible difference, including adjusting the organizational attitude towards quality. Software quality improvement requires a commitment from business leadership and a mindset change that begins at the top. The business benefits of good software quality are both broad and deep.
Not only does quality facilitate innovation by increasing predictability, lowering risk, and reducing rework; but it also serves as a differentiator, since it enables a business to set itself apart from its competitors. Most importantly, continuously ensuring quality will always cost less than ignoring quality. Quality is more than free when it is done right. The key strategy for reducing the cost of poor software quality is to find and fix problems and deficiencies as close to the source as possible, or better yet, prevent them from happening in the first place.
This strategy implies that wise investments in software engineering discipline and the cost of good software quality will dramatically reduce the cost of poor-quality. The concept of Continuous Testing is gaining traction and is entering the mainstream for exactly this reason. Continuous Testing is generally defined as making testing an ongoing, automated and constant part of the software development life cycle—so that defects can be found and corrected as soon as they are introduced. Measuring the cost of software quality in your organization is a recommended first step.
Quality is a different concept when focusing on a tangible software product versus the perception of a quality service enabled by software. The meaning of quality is time based or situational. Consumers now view quality as a fundamental measure of their total perception/ experience with a product or service, as well as of the company, delivery and maintenance network that provides and supports it—a kind of unified “quality-value” metric.
Poor-quality software
Poor-quality is not an inevitable attribute of software. It results from known causes. It can be predicted and controlled, but only if its causes are understood and addressed. The primary causes of poor software quality are:
- Lack of domain knowledge (resulting in poor requirements)
- Lack of technology knowledge (resulting in uncertainty about goodness of components)
- Unrealistic schedules (from poor estimation practices)
- Badly engineered software (resulting from immature, undisciplined practices; and using less qualified software engineers)
- Poor acquisition practices
- Communication and coordination breakdowns among teams
- Lack of useful data about the state of software quality
By understanding and addressing these top causes, quality can be designed in from the start, substantially reducing both the 40% of project effort typically spent on rework and the risks to which software exposes the organization, such risks are lost goodwill, and expenses incurred in recalls, refund, replacement, rework, waste, fixing deficiencies, cancelled projects, etc.
Factors about the cost of poor quality
We have broken down the cost of poor software quality into the following four main buckets:
- External deficiencies and failures The largest chunks of which are: finding and fixing operational deficiencies, and massive failure consequences
- Internal deficiencies and failures The largest chunks of which are: finding and fixing unreleased deficiencies, rework, cancelled projects, and troubled projects.
- Technical debt The largest chunks of which are the violations of good practices, and fixing problems that may cause future disruptions
- Management failures The largest chunks of which are unanticipated costs, customer damages, and reactive crisis-mode management behaviors.
And it costs heavily!
In the area of internal deficiencies and failures, we found that:
- From the perspective of the total portfolio of current IT projects, we know that about 1/3 of them will be cancelled or will fail in a significant way. That places about $300 billion of the total US IT labor base at risk. Cancelled projects due to schedule slippage or cost overruns are most frequently caused by poor software quality. We estimate that $130 billion is lost in troubled projects, and $47.5 billion is lost in cancelled projects.
- Finding and fixing internal problems and deficiencies—assuming that about 50% of the US IT development effort is spent in this area, the cost would be about $500 billion.
- The largest chunks are the violations of good practices, and fixing known, postponed problems that may cause significant disruptions. We estimate that the CPSQ in this area is $.54 trillion in technical debt in 2018; a huge number. This represents a potential future cost, and there may be many situations in which this debt is not paid or is forgiven.
Poor-quality is opportunity lost. Understanding where and why these opportunities exist is a chance to improve the bottom line. Although there’s good value to be gained by reducing waste, rework, and warranty costs, there’s an even greater value in looking for the root causes of these problems, because the return is normally much greater. The poor-quality software costs more to build and to maintain than good quality software, and it can degrade operational performance, increase users error rates, and reduce revenues by decreasing the ability of employees to handle customer transactions or attract addition clients. For the software industry, not only is quality free, but it benefits the entire economic situations of both developers and clients. The details of exactly how much can be saved through a focus on good quality is seen in the results of industry-wide improvement programs for software.
by admin | Sep 21, 2019 | Software Testing, Fixed, Blog |
Organizations continue to struggle to mesh app quality with agile using automation and other best practices. Many teams are struggling to increase the QA team’s effectiveness without proper understanding about the QA process.
Quality assurance (QA) is any systematic process of determining whether a product or service meets specified requirements. QA establishes and maintains set requirements for developing or manufacturing reliable products. A quality assurance system is meant to increase customer confidence and a company’s credibility, while also improving work processes and efficiency, and it enables a company to better compete with others.
The below is the Quality Assurance Checklist that everyone should follow:
- Establish QA facilitation
- Implement a Quality Management Process
- Conduct process review
- Create a report on the project status
- Perform process compliance review
- Identify process improvement areas
- Create process trainings
Software Quality AssuranceSoftware quality assurance (SQA) systematically finds patterns and actions needed to improve development cycles. SQA has become important for developers as a means of avoiding errors before they occur, saving development time and expenses. Even with SQA processes in place, an update to software can break other features and cause defects — commonly known as bugs. There have been numerous SQA strategies. For example, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a performance improvement-focused SQA model. CMMI works by ranking maturity levels of areas within an organization, and it identifies optimizations that can be used for improvement. Rank levels range from being disorganized to being fully optimal. Software development methodologies have developed over time that rely on SQA, such as Waterfall, Agile and Scrum. Each development process seeks to optimize work efficiency.
Waterfall is the traditional linear approach to software development. It’s a step-by-step process that typically involves gathering requirements, formalizing a design, implementing code, code testing and remediation and release. It is often seen as too slow, which is why alternative development methods were constructed.
Agile is a team-oriented software development methodology where each step in the work process is approached as a sprint. Agile software development is highly adaptive, but it is less predictive because the scope of the project can easily change.
Scrum is a combination of both processes where developers are split into teams to handle specific tasks, and each task is separated into multiple sprints.
To implement a QA system, first set goals for the standard. Consider the advantages and tradeoffs of each approach, such as maximizing efficacy, reducing cost or minimizing errors. Management must be willing to implement process changes and to work together to support the QA system and establish standards for quality. From the above said models, most of the companies adopted Agile and it gains more popularity now a days. Testing in an agile environment is different than the traditional methodologies such as waterfall. Agile is an iterative model of delivery which requires continuous collaboration between the team members, providing quick feedback and be able to self-manage. Agile testers know that they are part of the delivery team and that there is no separation of testing phase and development phase, but rather testing is a continuous activity which happens as part of the development.
Test AutomationTest Automation is vital to the success of an agile project because automated tests can provide fast and reliable feedback to the development team. Tests can be automated at different levels with different purposes. A good agile tester with sound technical knowledge is able to:
- Determine and advise which tests should be automated at which layer.
- Choose the right set of tools to help the testing
- Help developers in writing automated tests and analyze the results of the automated tests.
- Create different automation suites, such as smoke pack, full regression pack, end-to-end regression pack, etc.
- Minimize the execution time for the automated tests in order to obtain quick feedback
- Execute tests on a continuous basis
- Provide valuable metrics to the business
- Utilize the facilities of different testing tools to help with manual testing
Provide Continuous FeedbackOne of the key benefits of agile development is being able to deliver a working solution quickly. In order to move fast, we need to get quick feedback on each versions of the code.
We should be able to know, within a short period of time, whether new or updated code has caused any regression bugs. Hence, one of the objectives of testing in agile is to provide relevant information about the health of the application quickly. When issues are reported early, we can fix them straight away and move on. If the feedback loop is delayed, the team has moved on and it becomes more difficult and time-consuming to identify the root cause of the issue.
Feedback can be provided in many forms such as:
- Pair Programming
- Code Reviews
- Unit Tests
- Automated Integration Tests
- Automated Acceptance Tests
- Automated Regression Tests
- Exploratory Testing
The agile tester should ensure that proper and effective tests are written and executed at each level and should know that testing is a continuous activity that happens as part of the development. Thus a proper knowledge in latest tools and techniques and continuous feedback on product/ project will help the team to increase the team effectiveness.
by admin | Sep 23, 2019 | Software Testing, Fixed, Blog |
The realm of software testing has undergone some significant and positive changes and shifts in the various types of processes and testing. One of the most noteworthy changes relates to the responsibility and how of testing. Top software testing companies now propagate that functional testing is the joint responsibility of the QA team in conjunction with developers. While developers have accountability to deliver the app to the QA team, it is the job of the QA team to concentrate on automating the tests, building test infrastructure, and ensuring the speedy uncovering and removal of bugs and defects.
Some front-end developers believe that the additional responsibility of functional testing could take away from the core jobs and slow down the entire process of getting the product to market. However, experts at any leading QA company would differ – new testing methods and tools have made functional testing a lot simpler and easier, with its benefits outweighing the time and efforts invested into this form of testing.
Additionally, working together with the QA team means that developers do not need to focus on regression testing and bug removal. By integrating functional testing as part of the developing schedule, new features and time to market are significantly hastened. Without functional testing at the start, bugs and new features would take up a lot more time and effort. We will look at the top 7 ways that developers can control functional testing, and gain mastery over it.
The experts at a software testing company would tell you that testing is best done in a testing lab – and not on the machine. It makes business sense for organizations to have a local or cloud, testing lab. The QA automation testing team must use the local lab and its methods or work with cloud-based testing tools. This saves time and effort in managing infrastructure
Since timing and management of test cases are of prime importance – it would be better to create a test case in functional testing while creating a feature. It is imperative to be aware of some components while writing a feature – page objects for a new feature, URLs associated with the feature, and others. It would make sense to note down these test details in pseudo, and even though this does not create the test, it does help to remember the type of Software testing, and simply use the details to swiftly create them when required.
Without segregating visual and user flow test cases, you could end up with a never-ending test case. The reason is that user flow test cases need to have a higher level of complexity and include page objects and their interactions with them. The test needs to emulate user actions and can flow to several pages. On the other hand, it is easier to script a visual test – load and snapshot all the pages and compare the screenshots to recognize any current changes in the application. Since everything is tested visually it provides a view of all major changes from any previous releases – therefore predicting this test is not required.
Remember regression tests are important. Even though the QA team would run such tests, any problems could mean more work for developers. To ensure that there are no unwanted surprises, experts at top QA companies recommend the use of Continuous Integration tools, which automatically run regression tests. These tests would be written by someone else, all developers need to do is hit the run button while introducing new scripts to the suite.
Carefully select and use open source tools to ensure optimal benefit.
Everyone involved in functional testing must be aware of test scripts and the management of the suite. While the QA team would review scripts, the developers must ensure the tests are distinguishable and know which ideas can be shortened or cut off. This is important since failed scripts due to the removal of functionality could cause major problems in test runs.
Remaining calm and focused on functional testing in addition to all responsibilities as a developer, is important and an integral part of the process.
In Conclusion:
The quality of applications/systems/software is the responsibility of all those involved in functional testing. Developers and QA teams both are now an integral part of the testing process. Functional testing is amongst the more important testing processes – verifying the functionality of any software product. Businesses must partner with a top software testing outsourcing company to ensure they gain the benefits of functional testing – connect with us to work with experts across all realms of software testing.
by admin | Aug 18, 2019 | Software Testing, Fixed, Blog |
Software Testing is undertaken essentially to detect glitches in a software application or package. Such activities are driven by the larger goal of ensuring a flawless customer experience with the end-product. However, certain issues pertaining to nomenclature remain inconclusive. The severity of a software bug and the priority assigned to such a bug connote a variety of things. The true meaning of these terms, if left unexplored, exerts a certain stress on the outcomes of Quality Assurance services.
Severity: Many Grades
This term is deployed by Software Testing professionals to denote the absolute gravity which defines an undesirable incident during the use of a software product. Every QA Company must acknowledge the severity of such an incident and assess the impact of such a glitch on product performance. In line with this, test professionals may grade severity in terms of ‘critical’ or ‘major’ or ‘minor’ or ‘low’. Certain experts aver that the assigned level of severity to a bug implies the high quality of testing practices undertaken by a Software Testing Company.
Severity: How Critical?
The QA Services offered by a Software Testing Company consider the impact of severity in broad brush strokes. They define the term as the extent to which a particular bug/defect/glitch could create an impact on the normal operation of a software application. Some instances of severity appear when an e-commerce app fails to load despite repeated inputs; a digital shopper faced with an odd situation wherein a shopping app accepts an order but cancels it after a certain interval of time.
Severity: Critical
Glitches in software products that seriously hamper the efforts of Software Testing professionals represent critical grade of severity. Such bugs deserve the focused attention of testers who must work to attain immediate resolution. Similarly, critical bugs can result in the repeated crashing of an application, wherein testers are unable to proceed with assigned QA Services. In a similar vein, catastrophic system failures qualify for critical grade of severity. For instance, email systems that crash immediately after a user has entered credentials represent critical bugs that destroy the user experience; the QA Services offered by test professionals must remediate these immediately.
Priority
This term implies the act of prioritizing a defect based on the demands of business requirements and the severity of the defect. Priority connotes the importance (or urgency) of remediating a glitch in modern software applications. Typically, testers working in the domain of modern Software Testing services must invoke priority by viewing a malfunctioning product from the perspective of the end user. In common terms, bug priority can be assigned various values such as ‘low’ or ‘medium’ or ‘high’ or ‘immediate’. Veteran testers advocate the use of said matrix because prioritizing a bug in the correct manner helps boost the quality of the software development life cycle.
Priority: Conflict with Severity
Legacy Internet browsers typically remain behind the curve in terms of aesthetics and pure functionality. Such a scenario may spotlight the deficit in legacy browsers by rendering sub-standard views of an application. This, per se, indicates a major glitch in the code underlying the legacy browser, thereby indicating a high level of severity. However, Quality Assurance professionals may allocate a low priority to this glitch owing to the fact most Internet users update their browsers, thereby ruling out chances of mass malfunction in the display system. In view of this, the typical QA Company may not consider the glitch worthy of immediate attention at any level.
High Priority
An experienced team of Software Testing professionals may consider muddled views of a website to be a high priority target for bug remediation. Such an action finds justification since a late-edition browser would be unable to create sharp displays of a website. Hence, the code underlying the website deserves the immediate attention of QA Services professionals who must re-calibrate the visual representation of said website. Experts note that there is the lack of serious performance issues in such a scenario; however, Software Testing professionals must remediate the glitch in the interests of driving a smooth user experience.
In Conclusion
This analysis should encourage Quality Assurance engineers to consider high priority bugs at the expense of those marked high severity. This choice of action flows from the necessity of directing human empathy to the common user of digital products and services. Moreover, testers employed by a QA Company should work to develop a deep understanding of how various bugs and flaws may impact the experience of an end user. Such awareness should form the core rationale that powers the range of services that center on Quality Assurance. Additionally, product managers of a software application must work to create clear distinctions between the terms ‘severity’ and ‘priority’. Radical improvements in the scope and performance of Software Testing services would follow, and we excel in this realm as well. Connect with us to keep your applications and software bug free and of the highest quality.
