Software Testing: add the secret sauce to your solution

January 23 10:56 2018 by Mikhail Grechukha Print This Article

For companies to ensure a smooth and successful software release, a high quality is a must. Testing is called to evaluate product quality and to make sure it meets international quality standards. In terms of the current market conditions that require a rapid software delivery, testing becomes proactive, and it aims to prevent bugs, not only detect them.

Testing by development team

It is a widespread practice when a development team performs testing activities. Firstly, testing by development team helps to optimize the project budget. Secondly, programmers are fully aware of the specifics of the software under development. But these things can affect the outputs of work. In the majority of cases, developers do not conduct the quality assessment from the end user’s perspective. Also, there is a high possibility that the evaluation provided by developers will be biased as the team is aware of all technical aspects of the product. Knowing expected system functioning, developers may not objectively evaluate the actual product functionality.

Testing by QA team

To ensure an unbiased quality assessment, a QA team is applied to the project team. Test engineers are the specialists who know testing techniques, methods for bug detection, specifics of target users, and common issues for a particular software product. A testing team can be either in-house or independent. In-house QA teams collaborate with the development ones closely, and this may affect the objectiveness of quality assessment. Besides, if a company is small, then it may have a limited testing infrastructure. So testing will not be full.

Providers of independent testing services fully focus only on QA activities. As testing is their main source of profit, they have a large testing infrastructure including different tools and frameworks. QA companies monitor the level of competence of their employees and constantly invest in their development. Apart from that, each independent QA team has internal managers that regulate processes.

Beside that, in case of independent testing, dedicated QA teams are available for testing the software products of a certain type. For example, an online store is already developed. A customer is able to apply for a dedicated QA team that has a large experience in testing e-commerce solutions. The testers are aware of the common bugs and needs of target users. If game testers verify the quality of the store, then the results will be rather poor.

By having independent testing conducted, customers receive an objective and precise quality assessment, but they face several barriers that may affect the product quality. Working apart from a development team, independent testers may use outdated project documentation and be unaware of new data. Beside that, communication difficulties are possible because of linguistic barriers and multiple time zones of a customer, development and QA teams. Nevertheless, independent testing teams are very flexible, and they can adjust their resources to the customer’s needs.

Independent QA team ensures an objective evaluation of software quality as testers do not have any industry stereotypes and are unaware of the specifics of product development. Also, independent testing services help to reduce costs as a customer has no need to hire and maintain own QA team. As testers and developers are able to work simultaneously, the product release can be accelerated.

A high quality of software product is critical in the current market conditions. Testing assists in ensuring a proper quality and improve the operation of a software product.

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