The Importance Of Exploratory Testing For Enhancing The Quality Of Software

Exploratory testing is termed as synchronized learning, test design, and test execution. The test cases are not formed in advance done, yet are done simultaneously.

The testers use collected information from the execution of this first set of tests to manage the next set of tests.

This kind of testing is very beneficial in the cases where the test cases to be run can’t be determined in advance, a circumstance that frequently emerges in the beginning period of product development when the application is not steady and is turned to changes.

What Are You Testing?

One of the big operators of shifting testing from qa testing services to development is the adoption of Agile. But analyze the origin of Agile. It’s a method that introduced to help developers develop more code faster and in parallel.

 Each and every developer is allowed a single story that they set out to deliver in a two-week sprint. But what happens when there is no development, like in the case of an SAP transport? Who composes the script when there is no story or code to test against?

Without a testing team, this duty falls back onto the business. Business users are then pulled away from their work to document existing processes and run manual/exploratory tests of the system.

When they find a defect, they must go through the tedious process of documenting, taking screenshots and submitting to the supporting IT team. All of this detracts from business users’ primary jobs and reduces the value they bring to the company.

Courtesy: https://testingxperts.wordpress.com/2018/06/28/the-importance-of-exploratory-testing-for-enhancing-the-quality-of-software/

SELECTING BEST SOFTWARE TESTING SERVICES

With new technologies emerging in the market week after week, functional testing and manual testing are being replaced with automation testing. Automation testing is a technique used to simplify testing efforts. In automated testing, the tester creates scripts and tests various software using different software. The tools are effective for carrying out tests and compare the previous test results. Test automation uses designed tools to curb the tests being executed and compares the results to the expected results.

1.UNDERSTAND PROJECT REQUIREMENTS THOROUGHLY

To make the project a success, the main objective is to maintain the quality being provided to the customer. To improve the quality, automation testing is the best option. For bug-free products, the tests have to be well understood and the tester should dig deep to go till the depth of the project being undertaken. There are various tools which can be used to run the tests but the tester should be well informed about which automating test tool would suit the project.
   
2.    CHOOSING THE AUTOMATED TESTING TOOL

It is very important to know of the application that has to be tested and various technologies being used along with it. Once you identify with the requirements of the project, it’s now time to know what the right tool for the test is and which tool would fit the same. While testing and experimenting with the tools, a few points should be kept in mind.

• Support for platforms and leading platforms.
• Use of language which is easy to use and understand.
• Robust analytics and reporting features.
• Different testing solutions.

3.    IDENTIFYING KEY CRITERIA SUITABLE FOR A PROJECT 

Important points one should keep in mind before selecting the best tool to run tests:

• Test scripts being used should be easy to maintain and understand to save human time and resources.
• The tests should be made clear to all team members so that anyone can run them and execute them.
• The test reports should be easy to understand/
• Keywords should not be complex.
• The tool being selected should provide assistance and technical support to the testing engineers as testing can sometimes be complicated.
• The tester should write the codes which are being used since not everything can be recorded.
• The selection of tools should also depend on the project costs. The tools selected should be cost-effective.

4.    ANALYZING THE RESULTS 

The tools selected should be such that is not just easy to use but also provide great customer support through email or online forum. Every tool is good in its own way. Tools like Selenium Web Driver need vast knowledge for coding. It is costlier than most of the tools but at the same time is less complex and makes work easier.

CONCLUSION

The testing process, automation tools, and important software tools are all important ingredients for a good service to be provided by an organization.

Why Should You Outsource Your QA Needs?

Imagine you run a school, your bright students create a wonderful application with a great UX and want you to publish the app, they are very sure about the functioning of the application, and you trust their experience and make the application go LIVE!

The concept is so amazing that the app receives 10 times the expected traffic and the application crashes, making it unusable. This is a very common scenario lately.

Depending on the increased use of the software, digitalization is running as fast as Bolt and people trying to catch up tend to not follow the traditional processes of development due to lack of time and to beat their competitors in the market.

Users in today’s day and age want flawless, and fluid functioning of the software’s they use and to achieve that QA is the most important and pertinent process. The development team when testing their own software like the students will mostly find their code to be flawless with amazing functionality, but a fresh pair of eyes is agiler in identifying defects and small unnoticed abnormalities which might’ve been missed by the developers.

QA and Testing Services can be considered a smart option and here is why you should consider outsourcing for Quality Assurance

1.      Expertise

QA testers in independent testing companies have years of experience and a wide range of tools to test your software from hundreds and thousands of different perspectives.

There is no bias in the testing process and have trained teams in every step of the testing process that also works in a systematic manner and leaves no stones unturned.

Resources

A QA Specialist Company will have a big workforce, who are well trained, you could hire according to your needs, in your budget, without them being on your permanent payroll. They have ready test automation software’s which makes processes easier and swifter. Saves you both money and time!

You can also read this full article at https://testingxpert.quora.com/Why-Should-You-Outsource-Your-QA-Needs

Introducing Automation in Traditional Software Testing Best Practices

Test automation services and tools are very hyped by our software testing and QA industry. They are an integral part of our business application development lifecycle. With automation testing becoming an indispensable part of our software testing life cycle (STLC), various people are involved in the cycle.

Let’s have innovation in automation with our old-school software testing best practices to add value to our software.

1. Software Requirement Specification Phase

While preparing this document of SRS, the scope of activities can introduce test automation opportunities. Here, one more document can be prepared for the internal purpose to list down the various test cases that can be tested using automation testing for a software being developed.

2. Testing Criteria For Entry-Exit Points

Learn your software application being tested effectively. Here, we take care of when and how the testing of a specific testing phase will start and end. This will help you out to decide which automation testing framework can be required for a particular testing stage.

3. Checking For Bugs

It is not important to ask the other members of a software development team to inspect the software application for bugs all the time, as they may skip testing a few scenarios as per the user’s requirements. Rather, we can require dedicated software testing, QA, and test automation teams by outsourcing your software testing processes to a leading software quality assurance companies.

Courtesy: https://medium.com/@alishahndrsn/introducing-automation-in-traditional-software-testing-best-practices-878384ba0f0

Best Tips For QA Testers

Technology moves amazingly fast nowadays, and any company that isn't swift enough to keep up will quickly find itself struggling to stay afloat. This is especially evident in the software development and quality assurance industries. 

Long gone are the days when software companies could get by solely using an ad hoc approach to their testing practices? Outsourced QA teams can no longer fly by the seat of their pants, administering tests on a whim. 

Advancements in test management software have given departments access to a variety of resources and the capacity to experiment and combine different strategic approaches. The organizations that have failed to make the most of this opportunity have wallowed in mediocrity as their competitors pass them by.

Prioritize and Categorize Your Tasks

The period of CI and CD means ongoing releases and updates that means we don’t have enough time for in-depth testing of every new feature and fix. Hence, sometimes you require to give up on end-to-end testing.

The best way to deal with this condition and reduce risks is to prioritize and describe. First, Analyze the value of each feature, i.e., its business purpose. If you’re not sure, speak to the Product Manager.

Another, evaluate how complicated the testing of each feature will be, i.e., how many resources it will take from you and your team. Next, you can effectively decide which type of tests to do and when to do them. These decisions can then be reflected in the development teams and to PM, who can plan their own work accordingly. This will also decrease your own stress levels.

Monitor Your App Performance

When running tests for various features, you examine elements like memory, CPU, throughput, network, and different servers. Each of these system components has their own KPIs.

You can also read this full article at https://medium.com/@alishahndrsn/best-tips-for-qa-testers-1888362a9c41

Achieve Success With Outsourced Testing By Following Aspects

2016 has been a year of mashups in the enterprise technology space. The company software market has observed some unique upgrades such as Cloud accessibility/SaaS, machine learning, intelligent applications, smart device, Artificial Intelligence, intelligent systems, etc.

Open-source innovation has taken the commercial tool players by a storm and software testing has taken a whole new stance in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).

The year has seen a lot of partnerships amongst enterprise peoples in order to improve value for the consumers. For instance, today, even titans like Microsoft can’t claim to own a customer’s whole enterprise software business. Software quality assurance companies are working together to improve their products and jointly reach out to their customers with added value.

Achieve Success With Outsourced Testing by following aspects

Employing the Right Tools

Tools are going to play an important role in your partnership and so you need to carefully consider what you want to use and make sure that you and your partner have the necessary expertise.

There are tools that help with team communication and testing environment infrastructure. Things like Slack, Google Drive, Skype, and Confluence enable you to communicate more efficiently within the team. They make it easier to share your knowledge, and exchange questions and answers.

Other tools, like BrowserStack, Chef, Docker, Puppet, can supplement the test environment creation, helping you to deliver more likely results and set baselines. Then there are continuous integration and continuous delivery toolsets, like Jenkins and XebiaLabs, that handle deployment.

Refining Processes and Sharing Strategy

You must always encourage and implement refinements to your processes. That means gathering feedback from the teams to recognize exactly what worked and what didn’t.

Ask what the main challenges were and invite recommendations on how to improve production. Use those to draw up a targeted list of 2 or 3 things that you need to improve on and build a shared action plan, so everybody is tied into meeting goals that will profit overall project success.

You can also read the full article at https://medium.com/@alishahndrsn/achieve-success-with-outsourced-testing-by-following-aspects-bcef306fdc8a

Everything You Need To Know About Penetration Testing

What Are The Possible Causes Of Vulnerabilities?

·         Errors that may be caused during design and development phase

·         Incorrect system configuration

·         Human mistakes

Advantages Of Penetration Testing:

·         Effectively take care of susceptibilities

·         Reduces the cost associated with the network downtime

·         Meet regulatory demands and curb fines

·         Capability to maintain a positive image of the organization

·         Assess network efficiency

·         Upgrading existing infrastructure may lead to vulnerabilities which can be identified by pen testing.

Scanning Tools

A pen tester scans the target machine in order to find the weakness in the systems. The 2 main activities of the scanning phase are port scanning and vulnerability scanning.

Port scanning helps to identify a list of opened ports in the target and based on the list of ports you can determine what kinds of services are running in the system.

The next step in scanning is to run a vulnerability scan to recognize the particular weakness in the software and services running in the servers.

You can also read the full article at https://medium.com/@alishahndrsn/everything-you-need-to-know-about-penetration-testing-1a76cff0d945

Best Practices And Challenges Of QA Outsourcing

QA tends to be focused on measuring and analyzing the quality and enhancing the software through process enhancements, thereby managing the release to consumers.

Although automated software testing services normally do take place in this industry, the main aim of QA is on the processes and procedures of how software development activities take place.

QA is more focused on managing the product lifecycle and checking that the software meets the defined quality requirements or consumer agreements.

QA is less about breaking the software and finding issues than about verifying that it is possible to make the software work under a given set of conditions.

Here Are Three Best Practices For Getting The Most From Your Agile Efforts And Your Outsourced QA Testing.

Create A Clear Separation Of Testing Concerns

A difficulty with marrying Agile practices and offshore arrangements is that when there is a single deliverable that requires to be developed (onshore) and tested (offshore), you are adding in another step to be able to deliver a "potentially shippable" product.  With every problem, you add 24 hours of delay. No good.

The option is to build a clear separation of testing concerns. Engage onshore developers for verification testing via automated unit tests (using a xUnit framework). Engage offshore testers for validation testing (e.g., performance, integration, exploratory testing).

 This will eliminate waiting for initial verification testing, but still ensure the more robust validation testing still happens, utilizing your offshore testing specialists.

Improve Communication And Decrease Hand-Offs

Use video technology to bring the distributed team together. While email is absolutely fine to fill in the gaps and give additional detail. There is nothing that can replace face to face interaction.

Using tools like Google Hangouts or Skype, you can approximate the high bandwidth communication that you get with co-located teams.

Enforce Modern Engineering Practices

Organizations tend to focus more on "process" based solutions when there are various technical solutions to allow you to get the most from your offshore partnership. Two important engineering practices are continuous integration and automated unit testing.

Continuous integration represents a practice by which code is integrated and a new integrated build is created upon each check-in. 

This assures the system is always stable and any integration related issues are immediately visible. Tools such as Jenkins, Bamboo, CircleCI, and Team Foundation Server can help with continuous integration.

The following are the QA outsourcing challenges

Maintaining customer satisfaction:

Clients mainly concentrate on this challenge and this is the company's main objective in outsourcing. So the company must reach the benchmark level in achieving the outcome.

If the company is doing better infrastructure new technologies and IT-enabled services and all other software preservation services in developing and the critical project then automatically there will be client requirements.

Contract design:

This is the major challenge in outsourcing because the objective lies in the contract that is given to the vendor.

First, the contract is to be designed perfectly and must be explained to the vendors in an easy manner for accomplishing the goals of outsourcing. It involves software maintenance services, infrastructure, and technologies that are to be provided. You can also hire best-automated software testing services via various online resources.

Cultural barriers:

This is one of the main QA outsourcing challenges. There must be right cultural barriers between the people because the operating procedures vary from one company to another. Language and work ethics must be taken into consideration.

QA outsource Problems:

System access and security

Access to the customer systems by the QA outsourcing requires being considered in the context of current New Zealand privacy legislation, which is designed to protect personal information about identifiable people.

Courtesy: https://medium.com/@alishahndrsn/best-practices-and-challenges-of-qa-outsourcing-30eea0fb4262

How Crucial is Mobile Application Testing for Your Business?

Running a business and making it successful in this digital world is not as easy as it seems. This is why it takes hours of planning and effort to ensure that your service/ product is perfect and your website is user-friendly and up-to-date. The main aim of any business owner should be to provide the best experience to every potential client.

These days having a mobile application has become mandatory for every business as people want everything at the click of a button. However, in order to provide an improved mobile app experience, a specific functionality is needed. Any glitch in the application can cause huge harm to the product’s success and reputation of the brand.  Hence, software testing is important and for that it is crucial to hire QA specialists for software testing.

Mobile Application Testing: An Answer to all your Concerns

In the hunt for perfection, it is imperative to regularly review what you have done to meet the industry standards. This is where mobile application testing plays an important role. Mobile testing before the product’s release allows the business owner to identify what parts of the products are working and which part needs improvement and how well the application responds to a given task. Mobile application testing helps in fixing the problems before your customers are impacted, and your application gets a bad rating on that experience. A perfect mobile application testing strategy is essential to test your mobile application efficiently.

Mobile Application Testing Strategy

A perfect mobile application testing strategy ensures the alignment of QA with customer expectations, business goals, and industry best practices. Some of the important strategies that need to be followed while testing a mobile application are given below:

· Choosing a Mobile Application: There are two main choices, choosing between emulators and substantial devices or choosing a gadget model. Some other factors such as memory size, connectivity options, etc. should be taken care of while selecting a device model.

· Physical Devices vs. Emulators: Deciding among physical devices or emulators could be a major factor as, during the early stage of development, emulators are useful as they help in efficient and rapid testing, mainly in an agile development scenario. However, physical device testing leads to beta testing as a beneficial method that provides access to actual networks, real devices, real-world testers, and larger geographical coverage.

· Mobile Testing on Cloud: Testing on the Cloud has always been a desirable option for testing mobile applications as it manages to make infinite scenario combinations. In the case of cloud testing, the web-based testing environment is also offered wherein the apps can be managed, tested, and deployed.

· Network Connectivity: This is the factor that can majorly affect mobile applications as they mostly rely on network connectivity to function properly. It becomes critical to test mobile apps and get the actual picture in real network environments.

Conclusion

In order to stay competent in today’s digital world, it is important to ensure that your applications are running without any error and for that you need an experienced QA specialists. Hiring the best QA specialists can help you achieve the best results and launch an error-free application.

Best Leading Test Automation Methods

There is the various trend that I see with test automation on many QA teams. Many tests that all pass. Or some tests that flicker between pass and fail. Or some that fail all the time.

But one of the biggest issues is that they rarely remove any tests. Most of the people fill their house with things they never get rid of.

A team’s automated test suite can be the same, piling up with low-value tests. I call this phenomenon, “Automation Hoarding,” and it can cause many teams’ effort to grind to a halt.

Key Findings

·         A third of the companies across the globe use the following procedure for their test automation project: JUnit as a framework, Selenium as a Web driver, Page object model as methodology and Java programming language, which turns it to a definite best practice in functional test automation!

·         Test automation recording & playback is utilized among 7% of the companies!

·         Above 85% of the companies implement more than a single tool as part of their test automation framework.

·         Finally, the all-time favorite is Selenium, rated as the #1 most implemented test automation tool worldwide.

·          

Common Automation Tricks

Depending on the application, there might be various ways to build a page. Let’s consider a simple page creator widget that can be accessed by filling in a title, an overview and initial content in simple text boxes. Entering this information and clicking the Save button will generate a page.

Let's have a look at this example, I will want to not just look at ways to successfully create a page, but also techniques in which a page creation might fail. For example:

·         What happens if I build 2 pages with the same title?

·         What happens if start a page making process, change my permissions midway, and then try to complete the page creation?

Another challenge is needed fields. In contrast to a profile page, which might have various required fields, a page creator or editor may have far fewer required fields.

 Still, for each required field, make sure that an error message is displayed or there is some other way of alerting the user that they cannot proceed until that section is filled in. The more required fields I have, the more tests I have to create to deal with them.

The Most Implemented Approaches For Functional Test Automation

We discovered that many organizations use more than one approach for their automation testing services. Actually, in most cases, 3 different approaches are used in average! This emphasizes that with everything related to functional test automation, there is no particular recipe that suits all cases.

The Most Implemented Test Automation Libraries, Tools and Frameworks

The most popular framework used by companies is: JUnit (18%), and the second choices are: NUnit (5%) and Robot (6%).

In addition, there is a continuing trend from 2016 research: which shows a scale back in the use of commercial tools (from 19% in 2016 to 11% in 2017), as opposed to a growing demand in the open source automation testing services (from 57% in 2016 to 86% in 2017).

The Most Implemented Programming Languages

Java is the most popular programming language when it comes to testing automation with a total of 45%. It is followed by JavaScript (18%), C# (23%) and Python (11%).

Courtesy: https://medium.com/@alishahndrsn/best-leading-test-automation-methods-39881c090e02