Rigorous Quality Assurance is required to ensure any software product is launched to meet the requirements with higher quality to enable business continuity with minimal / no operational interruption. Testing delivers better performance of the application and improves customer reliability and satisfaction.
Why Quality Assurance?
● Identify the bottlenecks and pitfalls in design and development early in the development life cycle.
Defects identified during production operations prove to be very expensive to fix because this may require re-design, development and retesting of the application. This could be prevented with proper testing EARLIER in the SDLC. Poor quality software hinders business growth and continuity.
● Low maintenance effort that saves both $$ and time to improve customer satisfaction.
Testing would eliminate failures in production systems which in turn would enhance end user experience and the brand value of products implemented.
● A secure and efficient product is requisite to prevent vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks.
Security and compliance are critical factors to successfully safeguard personal data and ensure that it is vulnerability free. Optimized testing plays a key role in delivering high quality products and is imperative to deliver stable, quality product to the market.
● Emphasis for performance, scalability and reliability to handle rapid business growth and transformation.
Testing also emphasizes non-functional scenarios like performance and browser compatibility as well as User experience which can be accomplished via manual testing and/or automation tools.
Manual Testing Vs. Automated Testing
Testing could be broadly classified and executed in two different ways.
1. Manual Testing
2. Automated Testing
Manual Testing:
This is an approach that involves testing a software by seasoned quality analysts or test engineers by leveraging standard testing techniques. In this approach the test engineer executes the test to validate that the software meets the expected behaviour and quality.
❖ Effective for smaller products and earlier in the development cycle.
❖ Beneficial for user experience (UI/UX) and exploratory tests
❖ Manual testing is good for finding visual or UX bugs.
❖ User Acceptance tests
❖ Needs less technical skills and tool sets
Automated Testing:
Leverage various automation tools to execute test scripts which can be generated via writing code using programming languages. It increases efficiency and is less prone to errors due to minimal human intervention. After initial setup, testing tools can execute the tests, access the test data, generate the reports seamlessly and publish them for end user review. All test cases should be identified from a manual test case suite that can be automated.
❖ Ensure greater test coverage
❖ Faster test execution cycles
❖ Test execution is less prone to errors
❖ Effectively handles complex tests with variable data sets
❖ Highly effective for regression testing with CI/CD model