As the number of players grows, so does the role of QA to safeguard game integrity, fulfill end-user needs, and build their trust. Therefore, the question arises: how can an effective QA strategy help you release a first-rate game, be it on PC, console, or mobile devices?

We’ve got you covered: in this blog, we’ll walk through the reasons why quality assurance is a must and unveil testing types, helping deliver exceptional game experiences to consumers.

The pivotal role of QA for video games: 3 reasons named

Let’s delve into the reasons why QA plays a critical role for the gaming industry.

1. Optimized costs

By implementing QA early in the development phases, organizations track and eliminate defects before they cause any damage, like constant crashes or failed in-game purchases, and avoid expensive post-launch expenditures.

Just look at this case: due to high anticipation, CD Projekt SA compromised on quality to meet the release schedule of Cyberpunk 2077. The game failed due to dozens of bugs, which damaged the studio’s quality-first image. Fixing the issues cost the company almost $1b.

This kind of a misstep can be prevented with professional QA.

2. Advanced gaming experience

A buggy game is unlikely to be enjoyable for players, instead, it hinders gameplay, causes irritation, and generates a bunch of bad reviews. As a result, it tarnishes a company’s reputation, erodes loyalty, ultimately reducing revenue.

QA helps turn things around. By meticulously identifying glitches and technical hurdles, organizations ensure an immersive environment, fine-tune gameplay mechanics, and prevent lags and disruptions. All these contribute to an uninterrupted experience, keeping users engaged and enhancing their retention rates.

3. Improved safety and reliability

In-game vulnerabilities are of value to cybercriminals, allowing them to steal internal currencies, expensive digital items, and private information. According to Akami’s State of the Internet report, cyberattacks on player accounts and gaming companies increased by 167% in 2022.

Through quality assurance, businesses uncover injection points, reducing the risk of fraud and preventing cheating and unauthorized access.

7 core testing types to release top-notch, engrossing games

To deliver a high-quality game and provide an unsurpassed first impression, organizations can apply 7 critical types of testing.

1. Functional testing

Before the game goes live, businesses need to ensure that it meets the stated specifications and runs smoothly. Functional testing helps trace out issues related to audio and video, design, basic game mechanisms, and payment gateways, as well as errors in installation and launching.

2. Performance testing

In June, PUBG’s concurrent players reached over 376,000. Consider the high performance required to keep the game from crashing!

To ensure flawless operation, businesses should conduct stress testing. Since a sudden surge of users can lead to slow functioning, data losses, and security issues, it demonstrates how the game operates beyond its projected capacity.

Load testing, in its turn, allows checking the overall performance and identifying the maximum number of simultaneous players.

3. Cybersecurity testing

The global gaming market is estimated to reach $384.9 billion by the end of 2023. As the industry grows, so does the risk of cyber incidents.

Source: Statista

In 2019, cybercriminals discovered a vulnerability in Fortnite and gained access to 80 million accounts. They stole virtual currency, eavesdropped and recorded conversations, and used players’ credit cards to purchase items. No one wants to get in a similar situation, right?

So, how to mitigate such hazards? Through robust cybersecurity testing, businesses uncover weaknesses in cyber defenses, ensure sensitive data protection, prevent hacking and cheating, and safeguard in-game transactions.

As part of cybersecurity, compliance testing helps make sure that the game meets industry regulations to increase user trust and avoid hefty fines.

4. Compatibility testing

According to the Statista Global Consumer Survey, 54% of adults prefer playing video games on smartphones, 35% — on game consoles, 32% — on PCs or laptops, and 25% — on tablets.

To provide an unrivaled experience to all consumers, the organization needs to test compatibility across platforms, operating systems, and browsers.

As people use a wide range of hardware configurations (different phone models, graphics cards, processors, and memory sizes), it’s also critical to guarantee that the game runs smoothly on various setups without crashes.

5. Localization testing

To make the game enjoyable for players across the globe, companies should prioritize localization tests. It allows the adaptation of the content to the cultural nuances of different regions and ensures the translated version of the app is consistent and clear.

Localization QA helps identify bugs in these three aspects:

• National: incorrect currencies, calendars, metrics, number formats, and symbols.
• Visual: improper fonts, truncated characters, and placement of graphic elements.
• Functional: misleading commands and links, corrupted audio or text.

6. Usability testing

Consumers expect to spend a minimal amount of time figuring out how to navigate the game. After all, who would want to waste hours on it?

To make sure that players can effortlessly dive into the game, QA teams may suggest adopting usability testing. This helps identify glitches in the user interface, controls, mechanics, and menus, providing engaging experiences with no interruptions.

7. Test automation

To speed up QA processes, release a high-quality game faster, and stay one step ahead of the fierce competition, businesses often opt for test automation.

It’s especially beneficial in the long run as it reduces QA expenditure, saves efforts on repetitive tasks, and facilitates regression testing that is vital to make sure the newly added features haven’t affected existing functionality.

Closing remarks

As the gaming industry continues to grow and evolve, one thing remains constant: the pivotal role of QA in helping optimize costs, deliver advanced experiences to players, and improve software safety and reliability.

To make the game stand out in the IT market, businesses may conduct 7 core testing types: functional, performance, cybersecurity, compatibility, localization, usability, and automated ones.

Searching for QA support in releasing top-performing video games? Contact a1qa’s team.

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As part of the a1qa tech voice series, today, we discuss true IT leadership with Alina Karachun, Account director at a1qa, possessing 10+ years in quality assurance and software testing. At a1qa, Alina is responsible for providing exceptional experiences for clients, increasing their satisfaction, as well as building and nurturing long-term relationships with customers from the Fortune 1000 list and Deloitte Fast 500 winners.

So, let’s jump in!

These days, creativity is essential for both executives and their teams. Alina, please share your effective way to maintain and nurture your team’s creativity.

I would say brainstorming sessions are one of my favorite ways to empower my team’s creativity. You bring together people with different backgrounds and expertise and receive fresh viewpoints.

The thing is that good preparations make these meetings effective. To avoid unbalanced conversations, make sure all members contribute to the talk and no one dominates the session, everyone has time to express their thoughts. To prevent awkward silence, announce brainstorming in advance so that employees can prepare for it.

Do you agree that ethical leadership can help executives thrive? How does it manifest?

Oh, definitely. When leaders are guided by ethical principles, demonstrate integrity, and make decisions considering the well-being of all stakeholders including teams, they reinforce their reputation among employees, customers, and investors. We all know that credibility is key for establishing long-term relationships.

I honestly believe when they create a positive environment where everyone feels valued and heard, it helps attract and retain talents.

I suppose for ethical leadership, developing your emotional intelligence is really important to treat each member fairly. Sometimes, it requires setting up new — more transparent — processes, allowing top managers to control the progress of tasks, praise those who deserve it, and ethically motivate people who didn’t show good results.

According to the American Institute of Stress, 83% of US employees experience work-related stress. The same is true for IT teams dealing with tight deadlines, urgent tasks, and long to-do lists. What’s one way a technical leader can help them “ecologically” handle stress and pressure?

I’m a firm believer in the power of happiness so my advice is to look towards your team’s happiness. Happy, cohesive IT teams are better than anything for a project’s success. When the project is finished, put the stress behind you, meet each other, support each other, go hiking together, for example.

And work-life balance of course is critical. Your team will become more productive and better engaged in the workflows if they feel they have a good equilibrium.

This also helps the company reduce turnover and gain a competitive differentiator in attracting better people and retaining the best talents.

But make sure you set realistic daily goals and the workloads are feasible.

Fair and just-in-time feedback may help a lot in such situations. How to make it a team habit?

I believe that clear and constructive feedback can move mountains even in super critical and hopeless, as they may seem, situations. Many times, it helped me improve team performance, enhance collaboration between all members, and reduce stress levels. And the result? It impacted positively the business outcomes.

To encourage your employees to share feedback regularly, I think it’s necessary to explain and show its value for personal and professional growth, for a particular project, and for the entire organization in the long run.

People will be open to expressing their thoughts on processes, tasks, and challenges. However, this requires really well-established communication channels, such as one-on-one sessions, team syncs, or anonymous feedback surveys.

Critically, make sure all team members feel psychologically safe and comfortable when exchanging their feedback without worrying about negative consequences and judgment.

Alina, the last quick question — what one soft skill is essential for IT executives?

Hmm, great question. Oprah Winfrey once said, “Leadership is about empathy,” and I couldn’t agree more.

First, it helps me better understand end-user needs and ensure positive experiences. If we put ourselves in their shoes, we better recognize their needs, figure out the defects they face and their root causes.

Secondly, it allows effectively managing your technical team, foster an inclusive work environment, boost productivity and job satisfaction.

And of course, since IT leaders interact with customers, product owners, stakeholders, etc., empathy facilitates prioritizing their pain points.

So essentially, empathy allows you to make more informed and effective decisions, build a more cohesive team, and establish strong, trust-based relationships.

Alina, thank you so much for providing actionable insights into IT leadership! We are looking forward to more interviews with you!

Stay tuned for the next a1qa tech voice installment with a1qa’s top executives.

To optimize your QA costs, accelerate software releases, and increase ROI with QA, reach out to a1qa’s team.

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The telecommunications industry has recently been undergoing a rapid change. In addition to rapid B2B telecom market growth, which is expected to reach $181.35 billion by 2030, a global shift to remote work and the increased load on networks has forced providers to rethink their value propositions. Are you one of them? Read on.

Meeting the growing demand for higher-speed networks, mitigating cybersecurity concerns, and migrating to the cloud top the list of requirements for satisfying end users. 

Considering that the forecasted number of mobile audiences globally is projected to increase and reach 7.49 billion in 2025, maintaining a high quality of service becomes an absolute must. Among other things, fast and properly functioning software serves this purpose.

That’s where OSS and BSS come into play. How can we ensure their sound functioning? What actions should be undertaken when upgrading to the latest version or switching to another provider? Welcome to a1qa’s practical guide for finding these answers.

WHY DO OSS/BSS AND QA SHOULD GO HAND IN HAND?

OSS and BSS help companies streamline daily activities, improve operational efficiency, and mitigate business risks.

Through OSS, telecom providers oversee diverse operations with networks such as planning, configuration, service delivery, and fault management. BSS is responsible for the interaction between telecom companies and their end users. This stack includes billing, subscriptions, CRM, and more.

Why do these systems require thorough screening?

Reason 1. The activities performed within their work are related to the processing of sensitive and personal data of end users, and often such databases possess millions of records. When migrating to a new billing solution, for instance, these extensive quantities of data must be transferred in full and without affecting the routine actions of subscribers.

Reason 2. When undergoing a digital transformation and following industry trends such as deploying edge computing for increased bandwidth and low latency or switching to 5G for accelerated connection speed, chances are high that their overall complexity will place a burden on telecom providers.

Reason 3. Need-driven quality assurance makes the process of attaining business goals less complicated — 93% of service providers stated that it positively affects customer satisfaction and decreases the outflow of their subscriber base.

QA and software testing eases the process of modernizing digital solutions, ensures boosted cybersecurity and performance, and allows for wise allocation of budgets as QA consulting and analysis helps to accurately define the pool of necessary verifications.

TOP 10 TESTING TYPES TO ENABLE SOUND OSS/BSS OPERATION

1. Performance testing

You definitely need both server-side and client-side performance checks to make sure that OSS/BSS can cope with the required load, an ever-increasing number of transactions, simultaneous users, or to verify that the systems can be easily scaled up or down, depending on the changing project requirements.

For instance, an international telecom operator serving more than 60 million subscribers globally was to migrate to a new billing system which must withstand the load that was previously distributed between 25 solutions. They relied on us, and we opted to make a load testing methodology audit by examining the architecture of complex documents, analyzing both scripts and load generators, as well as monitoring the load, system status, and equipment during testing. This approach helped identify more than 100 bottlenecks that could negatively impact software throughput. Thereby, overall customer experience improved, contributing to the increased loyalty of end users.

2. Functional testing

OSS and BSS must operate in compliance with business requirements without any issues, the systems must seamlessly fulfill diverse operations with customer accounts, manage inventory, generate bills, and much more. For that reason, the QA engineers carry out different functional testing verifications — from smoke to acceptance checks — and verify separate software parts as well as the entire system.

Have a look at this example: a global distributor of telecom IT solutions for service providers, telecom operators, and their partners had a business goal to improve the quality of a convergent billing and customer service system, a comprehensive self-service system, and an integration platform.

What did we do? We developed test models and test strategy, functional tests, performed testing of new software versions, and ensured proper work of the high-priority functionality related to joining subscribers from multiple locations into groups for providing discounts on monthly communication fees.

In half a year, the company released sound functionality to the market with no defects detected during the acceptance testing.

3. Cybersecurity testing

OSS/BSS systems operate with personal users’ data and money transfer. So, it’s important to identify vulnerabilities, assess probable damage if there are security breaches, and confirm that the encryption of data at rest and in transit works fine, restricting access to information and diverse systems within OSS/BSS stack operates properly.

For that, task your QA engineers to perform penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, static code analysis, and other high-priority verifications. They will help minimize the risk of external attacks and save costs as defects will be detected at the earliest SDLC stages.

Also, companies’ IT teams must always accurately manage patches to have the latest security updates.

4. Regression testing

During the development process, a minor functionality tweak can cause unexpected software behavior and even critical failures. To make certain that recent changes and defect fixing haven’t broken well-working OSS/BSS parts, embed regression testing in the primary SDLC stages and check any functionalities that relate to introduced changes or fixed issues.

To decrease pre-release testing time on large-scale projects, speed up time-consuming, routine verifications, increase test coverage, and spot issues earlier in the development process, apply automated testing.

As an example, a provider of cloud-based software for inbound, outbound, blended, and omnichannel contact centers reduced huge technical debt consisting of 3,000 voluminous test cases with our test automation support.

5. Integration testing

The OSS/BSS stack is comprehensive and consists of multiple modules — inventory systems, documentation and reporting software, and other parts. To verify that these components smoothly integrate with each other and the entire telecom solution as well as that data is seamlessly transferred between them, utilise system integration testing using a big bang, top-down, bottom-up, or hybrid approach.

Read the full article here and delve deeper into the other 5 testing types that are instrumental in guaranteeing a top-notch OSS/BSS system.

If you’re ready to ensure high quality of your OSS/BSS system with professional QA support, contact a1qa’s team.

The post The ins and outs of ensuring OSS/BSS software quality: a hands-on guide appeared first on a1qa.

Current technology, like AI/ML, IoT, quantum computing, intelligent automation, among others, help leaders accelerate business growth, increase ROI, and stay ahead of the curve. Provided they are implemented correctly, and companies have assessed all possible implications for both the organization and their end users.

Today, we will discuss with Nadya Knysh, Managing director at a1qa, North America, 6 topical technologies, the challenges businesses should be ready for when applying them, and the ways to overcome them.

Let’s get started!

AI/ML. Businesses spend millions, even billions, for AI/ML enhancement and development. In your opinion, which industry will be most impacted by AI/ML and why?

“I believe that healthcare will experience the biggest and most unexpected benefits from extending ML/AI technologies application. Healthcare is an industry where decision-making is happening not just on a daily basis but on a second-by-second basis for billions of patients. There are two additional factors here.

Another factor is the cost of a mistake — and we are talking about people’s lives here. Again, having additional information on protocols and diagnostics can help avoid such mistakes, especially for real cases.”

Intelligent automation. When implemented correctly, it provides companies with powerful benefits. However, not all businesses succeed in that. What’s the main cause of this?

“Intelligent automation has proven itself as a successful approach to re-invent many businesses and their operations. I think the most common barrier when implementing it is the idea that it’s easy and quick. Unfortunately, in many cases, it’s not. And in quite a few, it won’t be 100% the same as it was before with a human being.

One will most likely have to structure (and simplify) business processes before automation, and others will have to learn to live with that. The implementation will probably be in stages, and one will have to work with a machine and a human being at the same time. Perhaps you’ll have to go through a cultural change in the company and the acceptance of the new approach to doing things may not always be that easy.

My main advice here is to make sure you plan thoroughly: start with uncomplicated tasks — they are easy to implement and adopt. While working on simple operations, review more complex, multi-steps processes: can those be simplified? Can they be broken into smaller pieces? You’ll likely have to work with people who are not tech-savvy too — be patient and listen.”

IoT devices for home. This technology is evolving by leaps and bounds. What new IoT features can we witness in the future?

“It may sound a little futuristic and maybe scary too, but my guess is that the next big step for in-home IoT is human habits learning and analysis. As for today, you can easily find an oven that you can start pre-heating on your way home or a washer that will begin working with an app click while you are sitting on your couch.

With AI development and big data that can be collected, I can see your oven connecting to your car. And your car sends a signal to your oven to turn on as it knows when you are on the way home and what the traffic situation is. Or your oven knows that you normally have a glass of wine at happy hour on Friday night and will turn on an hour later on Fridays. The accuracy of such behavior predictions is very questionable, of course, but some patterns are easier to manage and may be a good start for some individuals. So, who knows?”

Blockchain. What industry can it bring the most transparency to?

“This may be quite an obvious answer, but anything involving banking and finance. It’s not a surprise that money-related fraud is on the rise, whether it’s traditional banking, online payments, or crypto.

We all know the downsides of blockchain and specifically the performance of such a technological solution, however, I believe that the performance can be improved significantly in the near future. With this in mind, we’ll see more blockchain-based alternatives to the third-party services that we are used to now (e.g., PayPal, Square, or Stripe). Such services will not only bring additional security but also convenience to customers, different currency support, and international transactions.”

Feel free to read the full article here.

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According to the 2020 “Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US” report, software failures cost US companies $2.08 trillion in 2020. And this is one of the most intimidating consequences, not to mention the higher expenses needed for defect fixing and customers turning to competitors.

However, what are the problems behind the overlooked bugs from the QA side? Let’s reveal them in the article and share the ways to fix them.

Problem #1. No test automation in place

Manual testing is an essential part of every project, but it can’t bring quality results when speed, frequency of tests, and their monotony come to the forefront. After all, the human factor is still there, so teams skip deadlines and find missed defects when the IT product goes live.

How to fix it?

In the long run, automated testing is a way out, helping save efforts on conducting tedious and repetitive tests (like regression). According to the World Quality Report 2021-2022, test automation at the core of a business strategy helps identify bugs faster (49%), improve test coverage (47%), and reduce QA costs (47%). And of course, as 50% of 1,380 agile software delivery experts and influencers point out, adopting test automation provides them with a higher ROI, which is still a predominant business need of many businesses.

Source: World Quality Report 2021-2022

Problem #2. Deadlines, speed, and costs trump software quality

Imagine that the company employees had a goal of releasing a new version of the eCommerce app for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and because of tight deadlines, they decided to skip the testing phase. “What can happen, right?”

As a result, the company lost revenue and the app couldn’t withstand the influx of visitors and crashed. Did it help save money on testing? Of course not.

How to fix it?

Delivering quality at speed is one of the pivotal needs almost of all enterprises, helping adhere to timelines, stay competitive, and maintain top quality of IT solutions. So, what is helpful here?

• Ensuring enough flexibility

Flexible methodologies help shorten development cycles, ensure software update verification from the jump-start, and deliver them swiftly to the IT market. Agility also supports companies in sticking to ever-changing customer expectations and modifying project requirements. According to the 15th State of Agile Report, 64% of surveyed top management representatives highlighted that Agile helped them manage changing priorities, 64% ― accelerate software delivery, 42% ― enhance app quality. Along with that, 35% cut QA costs due to DevOps adoption.

• Shifting to CI/CD

How about detecting bugs in real time and fixing them as they occur? You don’t have to wait and put defect verification away until the last stage. All this is feasible by implementing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) within a test automation strategy. The software undergoes changes and updates during its entire lifecycle, and CI/CD facilitates ongoing testing, deployment, and delivery. And all this happens without sacrificing quality ― isn’t that a dream?

• Introducing parallel testing

Let’s look at another example. The deadline is tight, but there is a strong need to test the application across multiple devices and browsers. Not having time, you test only on the latest Google versions. Poor Firefox, Safari, and other users. This is how many bugs are missed.

If you run the tests sequentially, it does take time. However, there is a solution: parallel testing, which allows you to run the same tests simultaneously in different environments. Meanwhile, the QA team can focus its resources on other mission-critical tasks.

Problem #3. Lack of required specialists and skills

Having an in-house QA team is a good option, but is your team big enough to handle the workload, especially during a large-scale project, and do all members have the necessary set of skills?

Let’s imagine that the company has 2 QA specialists in place, and they specialize only in functionality. Of course, defects in performance (such as Flightradar24 platform failure due to heavy loads), cybersecurity (like data leakage in 2021, when the cost of a breach rose to $4.24 million), and more go unnoticed.

How to fix it?

• Onboarding the right in-house team

Since technologies are constantly evolving, QA experts should keep track of the IT environment and topical trends. This helps implement software testing approaches (e.g., shift-left and continuous testing) and methodologies (e.g., Agile and DevOps) as well as apply best practices to solve QA-related challenges of any complexity.

Don’t forget about the time management skills of your team members ― this is what guarantees that the work is going according to the plan and assists in meeting the deadlines.

Even if your team is staffed with QA gurus, ongoing training is still a critical step that involves running specialized seminars and obtaining proficiency in new QA areas.

• Outsourcing software testing

To avoid budget overruns, cut QA costs, and find a perfectly suitable QA team, companies turn to QA outsourcing which is expected to get $425.19 billion by 2026 compared to $318.5 billion in 2020.

When to onboard extra QA experts? Let’s see 4 common cases:

1. If you look for an effective and flexible team. Offshore QA specialists are quick to incorporate into your infrastructure, adjust to any request, and easily scale up or down when needed.
2. If you want to save time and budget. Independent experts fine-tune QA processes at the very beginning of a project, which facilitates easy and cost-effective defect detection and fixing in the early development stages.
3. If you strive to accelerate time to market. A dedicated QA team designs the most optimal QA strategy, which helps speed up the workflows and release the IT product faster.
4. If you need to ensure safety standards compliance. An unbiased assessment by offshore professionals allows not only detecting system minor, major, and hidden defects but also assuring the agreement with all relevant global protocols, such as HIPAA, FDA, OWASP, etc.

Bottom line

Missed defects are a nightmare for product owners, developers, and QA engineers.

To avoid this, just be aware of the main problems, leading to bugs in production and how to address them: introduce test automation, use modern approaches (rely on flexible methodologies, shift to CI/CD, conduct parallel testing), and onboard the QA team with the right skillset (internal or dedicated).

In case you need to ensure high quality within your IT products, turn to a1qa’s experts and get professional QA support.

The post Why do bugs get missed? Learn the problems and tips to avoid them appeared first on a1qa.

Within Web 3.0, companies offer AR spaces and virtual worlds for holding meetings, providing medical care, educating, and socializing. For example, in 2021, Nike opened a Roblox-based showroom and has attracted almost 7 million consumers since its release.

However, as Web 3.0 products are highly sophisticated, businesses should take exceptional care about their quality.

In this guide, explore the benefits companies attain with Web 3.0 as well as 4 testing types that allow moving flawlessly to Web 3.0.

Migrating to Web 3.0: benefits to reap

Combining a range of novel technologies, including AI, ML, IoT, and blockchain, Web 3.0 promotes better human interaction and improved user experiences within dimensional worlds.

Compared to Web 2.0, primarily characterized by a multitude of cyber hazards, lack of proper security, and total control by large companies, Web 3.0 brings more powerful benefits for both organizations and users. Let’s take a closer look at 5 of them.

1. Enhanced privacy

One of the alarming issues with Web 2.0 is the lack of safety, resulting in digital threats such as cryptojacking, DDoS, SQL injection, malware, DNS tunneling, and man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM). It certainly has a detrimental effect on the company’s reputation and depending on the industry, the average cost of a data breach may vary: for healthcare, it reaches $10.10 million, for financial — $5.97 million, and for technology — $4.97

In July 2022, hackers stole personal data (social account and property information, addresses, policy numbers, bank reports) from KeyBank’s customers via a third-party insurance vendor. The damage totaled $5 million. This can probably highlight the pivotal role of comprehensive software testing to verify the security policies and tools of both the organization and its providers.

Due to the decentralized nature of Web 3.0 and embedded blockchain mechanisms, hackers find it much harder to penetrate the network.

2. Customized experience

Web 2.0 is filled with intrusive advertising that does not always meet the needs of end users, pushing them away. AI algorithms of Web 3.0 allow detecting end-user preferences, adapting to them, and providing personalized offers.

3. Data ownership

Nowadays, global corporations, like Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon, collect consumers’ personal data to sell it to advertisers, making billions on it.

Comparing Web 2.0 vs Web 3.0, the latter allows end users to become the only owners of their sensitive information, choosing who to grant access to.

4. More efficient search

Today’s search engines don’t always operate smoothly and don’t always deliver the right results. As an integral part of Web 3.0, the semantic web doesn’t focus on keywords, but on the meaning of words and on the digital context. This helps users to easily find necessary information as the web pages are better sorted.

5. An advanced immersive experience

Immersive capabilities erase the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds. AR/VR technologies create new ways of interacting with people, goods, and services.

For instance, due to Web 3.0, 95% of healthcare organizations provide patients with distant assistance, which is twice as much as it was before 2020.

eCommerce companies can also offer their buyers a unique shopping experience regardless of their location, which means an expanded client base and more profits.

A comprehensive QA guide: migrate to Web 3.0 with confidence

As the metaverse, AR/VR technologies, blockchain, and Web 3.0 products are intertwined, it’s crucial to apply the most suitable QA strategy. We suggest following a QA guide that includes cybersecurity, performance, accessibility, and usability testing to smoothly move to Web 3.0 and deliver high-quality software to end users.

1. Cybersecurity testing

Since Web 3.0 is a complex concept, checking the security of its core aspects is a must.

It’s vital to conduct penetration tests, vulnerability assessment, and social engineering, helping simulate attacks and identify bottlenecks that can tarnish reputation and affect customers.

Being an intrinsic part of Web 3.0 software products, blockchain transactions can also be exposed to malicious attacks and viruses, thus requiring the early detection of loopholes. The lack of security measures may result in large financial damages, like what happened to the cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb which lost around $30 million in coins as well as the customer’s trust.

2. Performance testing

High speed, stability, and scalability are top priority aspects for today’s applications, and the same is true for Web 3.0 solutions. According to a survey by Unbounce, 70% of consumers said that page load speed affects their decision to purchase items.

The same scenario can be prevented by introducing performance testing. Try to imagine how many people can connect to a metaverse, but the question is, can your solution handle that load? In order for Web 3.0 apps (especially for AR and VR) to operate like clockwork, the company needs to identify all possible latency issues and ensure high speed, stability, responsiveness, and scalability of the software under both normal and overload conditions.

3. Accessibility testing

Since most Web 3.0 solutions combine virtual, augmented, and physical reality, companies should analyze from the ground up if people with disabilities can easily use them.

Therefore, organizations should ensure that the app offers special features, like captions and audio/video hints to provide an inclusive and easy to navigate IT solution for absolutely all customers.

By applying accessibility testing fulfilled in accordance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and other standards, companies verify whether:

• The alternative movement and control methods work properly
• Consumers with eyesight impairments can perceive visual elements and available content
• The headset triggers discomfort for certain groups of users (e.g., those who wear glasses).

4. Usability testing

If the Web 3.0 software product is too immersive, it may cause negative experiences, like motion sickness, eyestrain, headaches, and fatigue.

To deliver an intuitive and user-friendly app, companies apply usability testing. This helps identify virtual and physical balance, problems related to the end-user interaction, and failings, such as players falling through windows or getting stuck in other objects.

To put it short

Migration from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 helps businesses enhance privacy, customize end-user experience and provide data ownership, efficient searching, and advanced immersive engagement.

Adhering to a QA guide, embracing cybersecurity, performance, accessibility, and usability tests, may assist organizations in releasing competitive Web 3.0 solutions and delivering a flawless digital experience to consumers.

When you are ready to boost your Web 3.0 software product quality, contact a1qa’s team.

The post The ultimate QA guide for smoothly migrating to Web 3.0 appeared first on a1qa.

However, when applying this state-of-the-art software, healthcare employees use personal patients’ data more than ever before relying on health conditions and previous disease records. This is why while developing digital clinical assistants, we suggest making sure they comply with standards and don’t cause any harm.

Among the most pervasive regulations in healthcare, HIPAA stands out ― The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Aiming to defend sensitive patients’ data, every eHealth solutions developer tends to follow these inviolable safety obligations.

In the article, we bring to notice the HIPAA benchmarks and shed light on the strictly required data security aspects that aim to provide patients with greater control over their personal data and ensure its full protection. Furthermore, we appraise how QA and software testing services can help comply with the established norms.

Standards: regard or disregard…

Due to being among life-threatening industries, healthcare doesn’t excuse any errors. Even a minor one can trigger critical consequences for human well-being. Let’s say an unintentional misprint in prescriptions may cause inappropriate treatment or no treatment at all. Inaccurate medical equipment setup can implicitly affect the health state. If not mentioning negative scenarios that may occur when compromising on software quality and not adhering to requirements.

As it’s a mandatory step of verifying eHealth solutions’ functionality before going live, the HIPAA community sets penalties for violations of the regulations. In 2022, alongside a substantial increase in fines, reaching $60,973 only for a minor violation, the number of breach cases has also grown.

Moreover, businesses with 500 and more individuals impacted by leaks get to the Breach Notification Portal, known as the “Wall of Shame,” severely tarnishing the company’s reputation and reducing patients’ loyalty.

Shifting to digital document storage and management, information protection is gaining a greater priority. Businesses should implement safety measures, as private data might turn to the object of cyber attacks and inappropriate data usage. HIPAA Journal indicates the number of malicious actions is only soaring within years. In total, around 50 million Americans were affected by health data leakage in 2022.

Following three of HIPAA’s cornerstones

Within this eHealth law’s legal force, every organization and its partners that perform whatever activity over PHI undertake to comply with the Act’s requirements. It begs the question, what are those rules eHealth solutions should coincide with?

Despite the norms’ intentional vagueness, sensitive information keepers should take the digital, material, and managerial guarantees into work, as well as risk evaluation and ways of eliminating information breaches’ consequences.

Let’s get a more detailed grasp of each HIPAA’s basic pillar, helping provide PHI integrity and complete privacy.

1. Technical safeguards

Hacking and IT incidents are now the foremost means of data security violations. Though organizations are now much better trained to expose malicious usage, the number of cyber attacks is only increasing. By 2022, it reached 707 cases in a year.

Intended to protect PHI, digital regulations assume data encryption whether it transfers within a company, moves outwards on an organization’s internal firewall servers or is kept in storage. Hence, if the data falls into the hands of fraudsters, they won’t be able to read, decipher, and harness personal details.

While encryption is becoming a mundane phenomenon, HIPAA proposes to adhere to the following standards to defend the data:

• Access control – providing access to electronic PHI only to authorized individuals and preventing unauthorized penetration.
• Audit control – recording all actions related to electronic PHI, such as deleting or changing data in the electronic medical card.
• Integrity – ensuring the consistency of stored information and eliminating its destruction by unauthorized users.
• Person or entity authentication – verifying that the authentication process goes smoothly.
• Transmission security – checking the encryption and safety of the electronic PHI delivery methods.

2. Physical safeguards

Moving beyond the online space, organizations should keep all kinds of devices leveraged to access PHI safety. They opt for various scenarios of storing data, and have to be well-secured to avert unsolicited information usage. On-premises, cloud, or rented servers ― it’s no matter.

So, HIPAA material protection measures include 4 enforcing regulations:

• Facility access controls – restricting physical access to PHI.
• Workstation use – eradicating a possible negative impact and security risks related to the workstation’s surroundings.
• Workstation security – adopting physical protection to all workstations that possess access to PHI.
• Device and media controls – verifying the transfer, removal, and reuse of electronic media, containing PHI.

3. Administrative safeguards

One more pivotal aspect of a HIPAA compliance checklist is risk regulations. This area is under the most thorough control, which is held continuously to ascertain the company’s holistic and sustained risk management. To meet the norms, HIPAA’s specialists recommend complying with a set of standards to evaluate the already existing safety measures and analyze possible hazards.

QA as an accelerator of suiting HIPAA’s checklist

The development and digital life of any IT solution are speeding up with years. Due to heavy competition in the market and high user expectations, companies are to release reliable software at short notice.

As for eHealth products, companies should consider their potential functioning failures with particular emphasis. Quality assurance can be a powerful way to eradicate them, ensure flawless operation, and meet all the safety requirements.

Security testing lays in the heart of getting HIPPA compliance, as its main purpose is to ensure data privacy and end-user confidence in the application. Penetration testing is the most progressive and topical approach to derive these results. Acting like real hackers, the specialists may identify the bottlenecks in advance, so they can decrease chances of cyber incidents.

Since medical software products often receive updates and new components, it’s crucial to continuously track that they do not contain any vulnerable points. As this is a time-consuming activity, businesses adopt test automation to speed up regression checks and deliver a high-quality IT product to the market on time.

However, HIPAA compliance is not the only thing that indicates that an eHealth solution operates well and satisfies customers’ needs. Noteworthy is looking at the application from various angles to ensure its comprehensive and smooth work. As there’s no one-size-fits-all QA strategy for every project, specific business demand and objectives speak volumes about an appropriate QA package.

But companies may choose full-cycle testing, a one-stop QA measure that helps determine the necessary testing types performed during all the SDLC steps. It can include functional and compatibility testing or mobile and performance testing, or others that suit the project’s goals. Thus, one might be confident in the software quality and avert any kinds of defects in the go-live stage.

Taking an example, a1qa’s team provided all-embracing QA support, including assistance in HIPAA compliance, to a developer of the wellness portal and mobile apps. In addition to getting ready for passing HIPAA certification, the QA specialists performed thorough functional and compatibility testing, as well as test automation. Thanks to this, the solution under test successfully underwent the security and privacy control and featured total data protection.

In a nutshell

Within the healthcare industry’s gravity, standards compliance has become an integral part of medical software development.

According to HIPAA regulations, any eHealth solution should comprise technical, physical, and administrative safeguards as well as continuous maintenance.

To ensure medical IT products’ release and attain high quality and complete privacy, businesses should consider software testing as an inalienable SDLC step. By applying a need-driven QA bundle, you can meet desired outcomes and enhance customer satisfaction within tight deadlines.

Need support in eHealth software testing? Reach out to us to get a consultation with our QA experts.

The post Reaching HIPAA compliance for eHealth solutions through QA appeared first on a1qa.

In the article, let’s explore everything about mobile app testing: its significance and software aspects that are mission-critical to verify to launch a high-end product.

Why do you need mobile app testing?

Just have a look at this considerable leap. With the rapid proliferation of smartphones, tablets, fitness bands, smartwatches, etc., the number of app downloads reached 255 billion in 2022 compared to 204 billion in 2019. By the end of 2023, it’s predicted to hit 299 billion.

Source: Statista

Mobile apps have definitely become the hub of many industries. For example, eCommerce mobile IT solutions allow shopping online, instantly getting information about the latest promotions, and visiting several stores simultaneously within one click. Users are often impatient and want everything at once, so slow loading and bugs that prevent stable operation may form a negative impression.

Let’s also take the media industry. A clear example of our lives in today’s fast-moving world — whether in the car or on the plane, we use mobile apps to watch news and videos, listen to the radio or music, and write a few lines to friends or relatives. And to catch up with this pace, mobile apps literally need to fly.

To make sure they work as intended and meet customers’ needs, businesses adopt mobile app testing, as it helps enable trouble-free apps operation at any time, under different loads, and across multiple platforms.

Mobile apps testing: what to check?

Unlike web products, mobile ones are much more complex, containing a plethora of functions and more advanced methods of interaction, such as touch actions (e.g., scrolling and swiping) and voice functions (e.g., Siri), which require their constant verification.

Along with that, QA specialists should check the software in different situations: with and without connection or when it’s unstable as well as when switching from one network to another. After all, mobile apps work offline as well. If not testing all these cases, then it may result in numerous errors during the exploitation phase.

Let’s take a closer look at 6 main aspects of mobile solutions that are mission-critical to test to produce a high-quality product and get ahead of the curve with it.

Aspect #1. Functionality

What do people usually do when finding a bug in a mobile app that prevents its further usage? According to the Dimensional Research, 80% of customers won’t use faulty software more than two or three times.

To ensure that the IT solution works in line with the requirements and behaves as intended, companies implement functional testing.

Aspect #2. Performance

Nothing makes end users more excited than stability, especially when it comes to the IT solution performance.

Performance testing allows checking how the app copes with the regular and increased loads, and how it behaves when millions of consumers concurrently carry out online transactions. This is especially true for eCommerce and eLearning solutions to ensure smooth running during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or just an online lecture with a huge number of students.

Aspect #3. Compatibility

Incorrect display of the interface in different device versions, out-of-screen text, and inconsistency with other smartphone apps — these are some of the defects that arise when using the same software across various platforms. With compatibility testing, QA specialists eliminate these issues and ensure seamless functioning of the IT product across a bunch of devices, operating systems, browsers, and internet connections.

Aspect #4. Usability

97% of users believe that user-friendliness is the most critical quality of mobile apps. Companies may achieve this via usability tests, which are aimed at checking the convenience of software usage and navigation as well as the correct operation and display of all its elements.

For instance, if the company produces an eCommerce app, it’s core to verify the menu layout, product catalog, buttons, and other elements. Are they arranged conveniently? Can the user intuitively find them and perform the necessary actions? If so, then it may be a sign of good software usability that is able to satisfy customers’ needs and provide them with a positive user experience.

Aspect #5. Cybersecurity

Be it a financial, educational, medical, or other kind of an app, they all collect tons of data (addresses, phone and credit card numbers, and even health-related data). With the rapid shift of processes to the online space, more and more personal data is now stored on the web.

With cybersecurity tests, companies ensure strong protection of the software at all levels, eliminate leakage of personal information, and assure compliance with industry-specific and other international standards, such as OWASP, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.

Aspect #6. Interruption

Does the app behavior change when interrupted by notifications, messages, incoming calls, and connected or disconnected networks? This is where QA engineers turn to interruption testing, helping make sure that the software handles various types of interventions. Without it, unexpected interruptions may cause interface crashes, data loss, software breakdown, etc.

Test automation to optimize mobile app testing processes

Some tests are too tedious and time-consuming to perform them manually. To meet the project deadline and accelerate the IT product release, test automation is imperative.

Let’s take cross-platform tests, which are indispensable for mobile apps to ensure their smooth running across a variety of devices. It will take an eternity to check all possible combinations manually — thousands (if not millions) of them. In such cases, test automation greatly hastens QA processes.

Performance testing is also a candidate for test automation (to check response time, scalability, speed, etc.). By automating performance tests, experts generate situations with millions of customers who are simultaneously using the software to see if it handles such a heavy load. A typical case of most eCommerce, financial, and eLearning solutions.

Closing remarks

Online shopping, consultations with bank employees, studying from anywhere, just socializing and entertaining — these are some of the reasons why we daily use mobile apps.

Businesses, in their turn, should take exceptional care about their IT solutions quality to provide consumers with the best experience possible (and test functionality, performance, compatibility, usability, cybersecurity aspects, and more).

In case you’re looking for professional support, reach out to a1qa’s experts to fine-tune your mobile app testing strategy to perfection.

The post Mobile app testing guide: win the race with five-star software appeared first on a1qa.

Test automation blog posts

Test automation in Agile and DevOps: Maximizing flexibility and speed

Agile methodologies provide businesses with more flexibility, greater speed, and better communication between project members.

According to the 16th State of Agile Report (with over 3,000 executives surveyed), 94% of companies adopt Agile, 74% — implement DevOps.

To maintain the fast pace of development within these environments, businesses rely much on test automation. Integrated into Agile and DevOps processes, it brings 3 main benefits: accelerated go-to-market and testing time, reduced QA costs, and boosted software quality. You may ask, “How to properly configure test automation for flexible environments to reach the desired business objectives?” Follow the link and explore 3 core tips.

4 key QA activities to solve test automation challenges via AI and ML

Do you remember the days when AI and ML were only privileged and used within tech giants?

Source: Statista

Today, they help companies reach new heights, especially when introduced as a part of test automation. This is how businesses ensure faster time to market, reduce the number of discrepancies, improve flexibility, reinforce codeless automation, and increase the overall test coverage.

According to the World Quality Report 2021-22, 63–69% of respondents (out of 1 700+) perceived better control, transparency of their testing activities, and increased ROI. But we all want more. With AI/ML.

Which AI- and ML-based activities can be seamlessly integrated into test automation? Introducing smart test script writing, optimizing test automation with self-healing AI functions, conducting GUI test automation with ML, and automated monitoring.

To get more details about each activity, read the article.

Software testing guides

Mobile app testing guide: win the race with five-star software

53% of users abandon the app if it loads too long or has other mobile-related issues.

Source: Statista

In the mobile app testing guide from a1qa, you’ll discover: why mobile app testing is a must-have to launch highly reliable mobile products, what testing types to choose for that purpose, and why to introduce test automation.

The A to Z guide to functional testing

Yes, we’re living in the era of total automation, but let’s look at the basic reasons why companies test their IT products manually: cost-effectiveness, usability from the human perspective, and flexibility.

Source: State of Testing Report 2021

• “Why does functional testing matter?”
• “What types of functional testing are vital to include in the strategy to roll out a high-quality app?”
• “Is there a scenario to set up a manual QA process?”

Click here to read the guide and find out the answers to these questions!

How to implement 2023 telecom trends with QA

To strengthen the competitive edge in 2023, telecom enterprises may rely on 4 topical trends: continue adopting 5G and deploy 6G, implement the cloud, turn to network-as-a-service, and apply edge computing.

Source: Statista

To smoothly implement these trends and ensure the impeccable quality of the end telco product, we suggest conducting OSS/BSS, migration, integration, performance, and cybersecurity testing, as well as test automation.

Welcome to read the blog post to know what lies behind this suggestion and discover more about the trends.

Get ready for Black-Friday-to-Cyber-Monday shopping

88 million Americans opted for online shopping during Black Friday in 2021. Companies make millions, billions, or trillions during this period when their websites and mobile apps operate flawlessly and withstand the visitors’ influx.

What 5 questions should companies ask themselves to provide unmatched CX during Black Friday and Cyber Monday and release top-tier eCommerce software?

1. “Are you ready for a spike in shoppers?” Introduce performance testing to verify this.

2. “Does your software have glitch-free navigation and interface?” Discover it with the help of usability testing.

3. “Does the software meet business requirements?” Check it out with functional testing.

4. “Are the payments safe enough?” Rely on cybersecurity testing.

Source: Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022

5. “Does the app meet the cultural and linguistic needs of end users worldwide?” Implement localization testing and get the answer.

Delve into this blog post to get more detailed answers.

6 must-have testing types for eLearning and mLearning software

mLearning market size is expected to reach $25.33 billion by 2025, eLearning — more than $1 trillion by 2027. What a boom! To deliver a seamless learning experience to consumers, companies need to take exceptional care of their quality.

Source: Global Market Insights

What testing types are a must-have for educational software? Performance, localization, security, compatibility, compliance, and mobile app testing.

Explore more about these 6 core QA activities, helping boost the eLearning and mLearning apps quality in the article.

App software testing for telecom

Since the pandemic, telecom traffic increased from 20% to 60%. We understand the need to grow fast and cope with new challenges like too heavy loads, safety breaches, and slow delivery of new functionalities.

By introducing QA, a business can increase customer retention rate, boost CX, fine-tune internal processes, obtain core business systems with embedded quality, and drive business innovation with confidence.

Source: Precedence Research

Read the article and explore why QA is the key to enhancing the quality of telecom products.

Taking stock

Thank you for reading our articles! We will continue to share with you the most relevant and insightful information on QA and software testing in 2023.

In case you need professional QA support to roll out a high-end IT product, reach out to a1qa’s experts.

The post Best of 2022 by executives: 8 most visited a1qa blog posts appeared first on a1qa.

Take, for instance, the metaverse. This technology provides better opportunities for businesses to interact with users from anywhere in the world, conduct meetings or educational sessions with colleagues, and design impressive recreational areas to play games. No wonder its global market revenue will increase by 14 times and comprise almost $680 billion!

Or another example ― is genomics. It can assess human DNA and its structure to detect hidden health diseases or possible disorders in the future. Its great potential is demonstrated by the growing worldwide market size that will reach almost $6 billion in 2028.

However, the implementation and usage of advanced technologies often complicate digitization journeys because of their overall sophisticated nature. To simplify that, organizations may, among other things, rely on their thorough testing, which also helps prevent issues in the production environment, accelerate time to market, and optimize QA budgets.

How to attain maximum efficiency during this process? We suggest improving the testing workflows with the top 4 industry trends described in the article:

1. Ensure sustainable quality engineering to minimize environmental harm
2. Set up an automated-first approach to reach desired outcomes faster
3. Consider a quality engineering strategy to support emerging technologies
4. Adopt Agile and DevOps to improve the development process

Trend 1. Ensure sustainable quality engineering to minimize environmental harm

Open-minded companies tend to shift testing left to detect issues early in the SDLC, speed up testing cycles, lower costs, and improve cybersecurity. However, there is another significant benefit of focusing on software quality ― attaining sustainability. The more companies emphasize software soundness, the better they can operate without harming the environment.

The World Quality Report 2022-23 (WQR), which surveyed 1,750 IT executives across diverse regions and sectors, mentions that when sticking to sustainable quality engineering, organizations can enhance brand value (47% of respondents), increase overall revenue (46%), and even better employee recruitment and retention indicators (33%). Most importantly, executives think that sustainable IT will positively impact social and economic aspects, e.g., energy efficiency.

Source: World Quality Report 2022-23

Unfortunately, only in half of the cases do companies succeed in reaching set sustainability targets during software development. They already make a difference by relying on the cloud, test optimization, test automation, verifying customer journeys, performance, and CX.

In addition to these measures, they can prioritize a quality assurance process, initiate it at the earliest development stages, quantify environmental influence by configuring software performance monitoring solutions, and consider sustainability from the design stage.

Trend 2. Set up an automated-first approach to reach desired outcomes faster

Test automation remains an indispensable part of continuous testing and Agile-driven workflows and contributes to speeding up testing cycles, decreasing costs, and improving testing coverage.

Nevertheless, it’s difficult for the WQR interviewees to obtain the expected test automation benefits ― only 55.1% set up continuous integration and delivery, 53.4% managed to scale down QA team size, and 53.4% boosted test coverage.

When it comes to implementing automated workflows, quite often, organizations confront two major obstacles ― poor planning and its separation from the development process.

To improve the situation and optimize QA efforts, companies can focus on:

• Adopting test automation already at the requirements creation phase
• Designing an accurate implementation plan
• Analyzing tooling efficiency
• Betting on highly skilled SDETs
• Creating a long-lasting product development strategy.

Trend 3. Consider a quality engineering strategy to support emerging technologies

The latest technological innovations arising at a rapid pace help businesses simplify daily operations, deliver digital transformations of diverse sizes, scale on demand, enhance both customer and employee experience, and stay successful despite high market competition.

For instance, already today, the cloud helps organizations improve cybersecurity levels, ensure data recovery opportunities, and increase overall flexibility; the internet of things (IoT) contributes to decreasing expenses related to infrastructure and boosting deployment speed; AI/ML optimizes routine processes, forecasts failures, ensures personalized customer experience, and more.

This year, the WQR respondents stated that their current IT strategies rely a lot on such technologies as blockchain and Web 3.0 (85%), digital twins (78%), and the metaverse (69%).

Without a focus on software quality during their implementation, multiple business risks can arise, especially those related to cybersecurity, growth, and staying ahead of the competition.

To cope with them, organizations can:

• Attract seasoned QA experts who have in-demand skills, e.g., automated, cybersecurity testing, AI/ML
• Consider introducing DevSecOps to enable high software resistance to cyberattacks from the early development stages
• Design an effective strategy for smooth adoption.

Trend 4. Adopt Agile and DevOps to improve the development process

Organizations that jumpstart a cultural shift towards Agile and DevOps improve the quality of their delivery, attain faster and more frequent releases, speed up the process of obtaining feedback, and enhance the levels of customer and employee satisfaction.

The journey to embracing agility is complicated and requires the support of experienced QA engineers who possess skills related to test automation and CI/CD toolkits, performance and cybersecurity testing, deep knowledge of the industry, and can become full-fledged members of cross-functional teams. According to the WQR, organizations still lack professional quality engineers who can assist in infusing and developing Agile workflows.

To simplify the transition, companies can embed test automation along with performance, cybersecurity, or integration testing, consider the toolkit in advance, take care of appropriate quality metrics, and continue betting on skilled people.

Closing

Today, companies more often give preference to advanced technologies to improve organizational performance and keep up with increasing market competition. However, their roll-out and further usage are far from being the easiest task.

QA and software testing can simplify it and contribute to accelerating QA activities and reducing expenses. To increase the efficiency of this process, organizations can consider industry QA trends to reach set objectives and ensure that end users are delighted with delivered IT solutions: test automation, Agile workflows, timely quality assurance for advanced technologies, and sustainable quality engineering.

Reach out to a1qa’s experts to ensure high quality of your software solutions.

The post The future of software testing: top 4 impactful trends that will dominate in 2023 appeared first on a1qa.

In this article, I will be covering the basics and will be giving some tips so that you have a steady journey on the automation rollercoaster. Let’s go!

What is automation testing?

It is a technique where specialists use automation testing software tools to execute a test case suite.

Automation testing demands considerable investments of money and resources, and that is why it must be done properly.

Why is test automation beneficial?

From my experience, it is the best way to increase effectiveness, test coverage and increase the velocity by which we release.

Some statements around automation benefits:

• In some cases, it can be more than 70% faster than manual testing.
• It generally is reliable if done correctly and maintained smartly.    
• Automation can be run multiple times and overnight.
• It reduces the chance of human error and improves accuracy.
• Automation testing helps increase test coverage.

Automation for me, has been a life saver, where we have not had the capacity or time to test manually. It has helped to catch defects which would have impacted our customers greatly.      

My key advice is to run automation frequently, and the quicker the feedback — the better!

What should we automate?

Now, this is a really important question. We should not automate everything, especially if it leads to flaky tests.

6 cases to automate:

1. High-risk areas — business-critical test cases.
2. Test cases that are repeatedly executed.
3. Positive test cases.
4. User interface (UI) tests.
5. Test cases that are very tedious or difficult to test manually.
6. Test cases that are very time-consuming to run and create.

Example scenarios of what we ‘should’ automate:

• Compare two images pixel by pixel.
• Comparing two spreadsheets containing thousands of rows and columns.
• Testing an application on different browsers and different operating systems (OS) in parallel.

What should we NOT automate?

Now, the counter question, this is key and we should always have this at the back of our mind when automation test design takes place.

We should not automate:

• Test cases that are newly designed and not executed manually at least once.
• Test cases for which the requirements are frequently changing.
• Test cases which are executed on an ad-hoc basis.
• Negative failover tests.
• Tests with massive pre-setup.
• Test cases where the return on investment based on automation effort will take a long time.

The process of test automation

This should be planned out, and some time should be invested to think it through. Many times, I have seen automation fail due to flaky tests and people choosing to automate for the sake of automation.

Here are the steps for automating your software testing:

1. Select the test tool — this is done via a proof of concept and involves many stakeholders so that the right decision can be made.

2. Define the scope of automation — facts to consider:

• The features — this should be clear

• Devise the scenarios which need a large amount of data

• Technology feasibility review

• Review the complexity of test cases

• Review whether we want to incorporate cross-browser testing.

3. Planning, design, and development:

• Automation tool selection
• Framework design and its features:
  • The most popular open-source web framework is ‘Selenium WebDriver’
• Define your scripting standards, such as:
  • Uniform scripts, comments, and indentation of code
  • Exception handling
  • User-defined messages are coded
• In-scope and out-of-scope for automation
• Automation test bed preparation
• Schedule and timeline of scripting and execution
• Deliverables of automation testing.

4. Test execution.

5. Maintenance.

The last phase of ‘maintenance’ is very key — as if the tests are not maintained, the technical debt is not brought down and those ‘flaky’ tests are not removed; you will actually find that automation testing is taking more time and money investment than manual testing.

How to measure the success of your automation suite?

So, we have automation in place. It is important to track success, and if success is not being met, if you have data to track, you can get back on the right path.

Some automation metrics I would recommend to measure:

• Percentage of defects found by automation.
• Time required for automation testing for each and every release cycle.
• Time taken for a release due to automation testing vs time taken if scripts are manually tested.
• Customer satisfaction index.
• Productivity improvement.

Conclusion

Automation is awesome, and it can really add to your QA capabilities, though it must be done and thought out properly.

The post Release at pace with test automation: What, why, and how to measure success? appeared first on a1qa.

We often hear the words ‘great culture,’ and it is emphasised in many QA companies’ websites and job specifications.

We all want a great culture, but do we actually understand it enough to maintain or improve it?

In this article, I will be sharing all of that.

What is culture of happiness?

I like to think of it like the foundation of a house — without a strong one, there will be no stability to it, and it certainly will not last. It is the key element by which everything else is added, such as a kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, study, and garden, to name a few.

Culture takes place whether you want it to or not. It is the nucleus of a QA company and is in large part created by the founders and all employees — not by their words alone, but more so by their actions.

Strategy is key in business, but without the right culture, any strategy will fail.

Culture is led by beliefs, attitudes, and practices that people are exposed to when they interact with your business.

Culture, or lack of it, is infinitely more important and could kill your strategy before it even gets off the ground.

Strategy and culture need to mutually support each other. A bit like in a car — no matter how good the parts are, without wheels, you will not be moving very far.

Why does culture matter?

Think back to your past roles that you have enjoyed the most — I’m sure the reason was due to an amazing culture. The opposite applies for roles which you did not like.

There is evidence that good cultures create a feedback loop that often self corrects bad strategy, and also that good strategy gets consumed by bad culture.

From my experience, a better culture helps to create a higher chance of great delivery output — take a happy environment generally, there will be learning, and all the software testing team will be moving in the same direction.

I have seen this in action, and for me it was due to the crew being synchronised and working to meet a common goal. If a team works together, there’s a bigger chance to meet our objectives.

What impact does bad culture have?

A bad culture normally creates fear in the QA team; thus, they generally will be scared to innovate and will make more mistakes. Another big impact — people will not want to work within the company in the future. Or ever come back.

People do not leave the company; they leave the culture.

QA culture also hits revenue; the best performing software testing teams generally are those performing the best long term. In my view, squads who have a bad culture and are still successful, will only maintain high performance in the short term, or they may not actually be meeting their maximum output.

What should your company’s QA culture include?

Remember that culture is more than just creating a great place to work and some words in your mission statement.

The culture should determine what is encouraged, discouraged, and  acceptable.

It includes:

• Adaptiveness to change — in business, we need to be flexible to adapt quickly.
• Innovation — making great new software products to keep ahead of the competition.
• Risk tolerance — how much risk are we willing to take?
• Decision making — being brave to take decisions, even when they may fail.
• Efficiency — ensuring that we are efficient in our output.
• Customer focus — how is our culture driving what a customer wants?

Culture starts at the top of a company, and each layer below should be aligned with this.

What can you do to improve your company culture?

• ‘Check the pulse’ and understand your culture.
• Foster conversations and ensure it is a safe space to talk.
• Map your values and purpose.
• Celebrate success together.
• Culture is created by behaviours that you tolerate.
• Change starts at the top — company leaders show how they care about culture.

A leader recognises they are ‘a voice’ around the table, not the ‘voice.’ They allow others to say how culture can be improved and also listen to any concerns within software testing teams.

For me, companies that are culture conscious outperform industry benchmarks. What makes a business unique is its culture and it is often used as a competitive advantage.

I like to think of culture as a tailwind for a travelling plane, it pushes a plane forward and if stars align, you will make it to your destination faster, therefore, it adds hidden value.

Closing

As a leader, we can all impact the culture of the company and move the lever. Though, it takes patience and perseverance.

The post What is a сulture of happiness for a QA company? appeared first on a1qa.

Firstly, when a team details that they would like to be more agile and deliver updates more frequently, it can scare a QA team. They will envisage that they will need to test a code base that changes daily with no breaks and not enough time for each.

Is it so? Let’s answer this question together.

What about Agile manifesto?

You may have also heard the myth that companies get rid of QA when they are trying to move towards agile. This is incorrect. You will need to focus more on quality if you are adopting agile.

In an agile team, everyone is responsible for quality. The goal is not just finding bugs and defects, but also preventing them during the development cycle.

How can QA meet the agile manifesto?

4 key aspects that I have used to follow QA in an agile form include:

• Add QA documentation where it brings value.
• Always look for automation opportunities.
• Always look into automation tools, thus making your testing more efficient, repeatable, and easier-to-track.
• Understand your customers and ensure that you know the quality level they expect. Also, the double bonus, you will be automating smartly — the right things.

I have touched on automation in the above — automation is key as you have guide rails, so a good opportunity to react quickly to changing priorities and have a constant quality measure.

QA should be involved throughout the whole agile process. They should be a part of the team. The key to this is pairing on a task and discussing how a story should be tested. If we involve QA earlier, why not then shift QA left and have more of a chance to meet the delivery at high-quality considerations?

8 key tips for QA members working in an agile team

1. Join the agile team and work together

• Standup, retros, demos, planning sessions.

2. Focus on the existing methodologies

• Learn how your customer uses the product and prioritise what you test.

3. Automate your key tests

• Black box testing and working with engineering so you pair on automation.

4. Test manually for the right reasons

• Exploratory testing and always asking the ‘What if’ questions.

5. Continually improve

• Build maintainable and non-flaky test suites.

6. You must have excellent product knowledge

• Collaborate with your product team and learn about the product.

7. Shift left

• Test as early as possible and in smaller chunks.

8. Shift right

• Look to monitor, identify, investigate and remediate based on real-world scenarios and conditions.

The QA team is not the gatekeeper of the quality of a software product. The whole TEAM is responsible.

The agile QA process: 9 steps

QA should be involved in all of the above and think of ways to implement them with more automated processes or faster feedback loops.

Summary

What is important? To reflect, refine, improve, and progress with enhancing processes. Following agile is never easy, though, my advice is — by adding more value with, let’s say, automation it will make a massive difference.

The post Agile QA – what is needed for greater flexibility and speed? appeared first on a1qa.

Through the mature culture of excellence, it’s easier for companies to ride the wave of innovation, accelerate time to market, and minimize production failure risks. But how to build this true culture of quality? How do we seamlessly embed QA practices into the Agile environment, and how can automation enhance testing capabilities?

To answer these and many other topical questions, we took an interview with Dileep Marway, an experienced QA engineer in the past and VP of Engineering and Quality at SHL ― a world-known developer of data-driven talent acquisition and talent management solutions that help businesses maximize their people’s potential by building agile, highly flexible teams.

With around 13 years of contributing to the QA field, Dileep regularly gives back to the IT community by writing content to show the value of QA for releasing sound software. This time he produced the series of articles “Agility and speed: Supercharging your business strategies with QA” for a1qa that we’ll talk about today and share with you all very soon!

Dileep, please tell our audience some words about yourself and how you got to the position you are in today.

I’ve worked in a multitude of roles, and quality assurance is where I started. Essentially, I’ve been doing digital transformations at different scales, and a lot of that has had quality at the heart of everything that we do. Making sure that customers are getting the right type of quality and what they expect has been vital.

If I look at my journey in my previous role, I accomplished digital transformation for a startup-type team in central Birmingham, UK, and most recently, I’m doing a digital transformation for an enterprise-type organization at SHL.

Thank you for introducing yourself. Why did you choose to contribute to the quality assurance field?

I started as a graduate tester, and the main reason for that was generally I was very structured in my approach. I initially studied pharmacy at university, then I moved to Computer Science. I always go back to that structured scientific approach, as it has suited the quality assurance realm well.

I was very passionate about quality when I first joined, but for me, to be more rounded as a QA engineer, I needed to understand the other areas of the software development life cycle.

In my career, I have worked in production support, in product, in delivery, and I was Head of DevSecOps. As a QA engineer, it’s good to understand the other areas very well because it’s good to collaborate and improve processes as a whole.

Quality cannot be achieved just by one person; quality has to be reached by a team.

We know that you give back to the IT community and write content to raise the awareness of QA value for the business. Could you, please, briefly introduce the series of blog posts for a1qa that you’re working on right now?

Sure. Luckily a1qa gave me this opportunity, and it’s very kind of them. I enjoy blogging, writing, and helping others. I’d like people to help each other because that’s how we all level up ― and everyone can get to their destination.

The first blog that I did was on Agile QA. And this is a very important subject because everybody wants to go fast. But essentially, it’s key that we go at a speed and follow users’ expectations. As an example, if a client wants a car and they want it to be red, they expect the car to be red at the end of the week, not for it to be blue. In this article, I’ll share tips and good ways of working that a QA member can contribute to being Agile and contribute to the output in a team.

The second article was about the culture of happiness. Why is this important? It’s key in any type of digital transformation, whether it’s quality, engineering, or DevSecOps, culture should be at the heart of everything that you do. I always say: “If you are in a happy team, you have a good output of work.” And if somebody wants to go to work, they are happy and will be doing a good job.

And then the last blog is on automation. This is essentially talking about automation, what is the value, why people automate, and also what aspects you need to do before you jump into automation.

What I’ve seen in my experience is that everybody wanted to automate but wasn’t quite ready. There are certain things that they need to do before starting to automate because otherwise, once you do, it’s a bit like if you buy a house that has leaky plumbing. And you are just trying to fix the pipes all the time, whereas you should be checking them before you buy the house in the first place. So, that’s a nice analogy that I like to use. And in the article, I’ll be covering that.

Good examples. Thank you! In your opinion, why should companies go for independent software testing instead of in-house?

My experience is that firstly, it depends on the type of journey the team is on. Initially, it’s good to know where you are in the transformation. Are they experienced or not in their QA practices? Is there a collaboration between engineering quality and product?

For me, where you’ve got a team, which is performing poorly, it’s great to bring in experts, learn from them, and say: “Look, I’m monitoring this team, but I’ve got bias because I’ve been looking after them for so long.”

That’s where I found great value in getting independent services. The experts can come in and independently review your company, provide an unbiased view, and make recommendations on what they would do because they know best practices and worked with other companies, maybe in a similar area.

In addition to telling you what is right, they can also say, “We can give you expertise in this area, which can fill that gap.” Whereas recruiting yourselves in-house, you have to go through a transition of training. Even before recruiting, find the right candidates, and then actually go through a transition. Maybe, if the time is there, it’s good to do both in parallel.

So, work with a testing partner, hire internally, and the two work together. But generally, where deadlines are short, stakeholder wants things quickly, stakeholder wants to see the value from the project quickly.

I think it’s a good idea to get specialists’ help – that’s where a testing partner really can excel.

Absolutely. As you’ve mentioned, one of the blogs is devoted to culture. In your opinion, how should the company train its employees to build a true culture of quality nowadays?

Firstly, there’s the culture on the people’s side, and that should be set throughout the company.

If you go to the top from bottom or bottom to top, everyone should have the same vision. They should talk to people with respect, give constructive, not destructive criticism, and respect your peers.

And there should be a level of psychological safety. If you make a mistake, you can learn from this mistake. That’s the first side that is very important. From a quality perspective, engineering, QA, and those in product roles need to work as one team.

What I really like is that QA isn’t just owned by an isolated QA team. You can run your automation pack, you’ve got engineers who are following TDD and unit tests – and that gives time for QA to specialize. For instance, QA is very good at exploratory testing, and you can add this niche skill, and the team can work together.

In a good culture of QA, they would say: “As a team, we’ve dropped the ball, but to learn, we’ll do this better.” That’s what I mean when I say a culture of QA. It’s more of a collaborative team effort to get something right.

Thank you for such good points. If you speak about Agile, from your professional experience, does Agile need QA, or does QA need Agile to ensure high-quality software?

It goes both ways. To operate in a DevOps culture, you need quick feedback. But how can we get it? The answer is QA.

You need test automation, great performance, and security tests. There’s always going to be a quality need, and the team requires processes in place at speed so that they can move in an Agile way.

For me, when people say that to go fast, they don’t need QA, I’d say, “QA is as important as having engineering in Agile. You need all your key team members there to succeed.”

If you turn to digital transformations, can they be successful without an Agile approach today?

For me it depends on the organization type and its maturity.

For instance, I worked on major projects where you need such a structured approach that operating in an Agile way is quite hard to do if you haven’t got the skills, the team, the right architecture, and processes.

What I found recently is if the architecture has been created from scratch or the engineering has been built from the ground up, then you can go with Agile in mind. But when you have legacy systems, sometimes you have to take a more pragmatic view.

And your advice on how to embed QA in Agile to ensure confident and secure digital transformation?

I’d say you do want QA to be introduced as early as possible. What I find very important is how QA gets involved in Agile ceremonies, so is QA asking the right questions? Asking the “how,” asking the “what.”

What would I do if I was in a session? I’d ask what the impact analysis is. I sit with the engineer and say, “Can you show me, which other areas of the application are impacted by this change, how are you making the change at a code level?” At the same time, I’d start to run my test cases, and I’d think outside the box.

As an example, if I’ve got a username and password, would I just put the right username and password in? No, I’d put characters in the username, I’d put emojis in it, I’d probably put some SQL code injection in it. So, for me, it’s the initial mindset and the investment that you put at the start of the software development life cycle.

When you get to the part where you’re running, you can meet the Agile processes because you’ve thought further ahead of the game. Initially, it’s difficult because it’s still slow but once you start understanding what to test, and what’s a high priority, then you can start to use automation.

Automate the high-priority test cases that matter to a user first. And then run these test cases in an automated manner regularly. The more you run, the better, because you get fast feedback. You find out how flaky your tests are, and whether there are any false negatives in the tests. The same is with the code, the more regularly you run it, the better because you know that something is broken.

So, if you’re a part of a DevOps culture to your engineering and your QA processes, essentially, the team will start to move in an Agile manner.

What should companies consider before introducing test automation, and why does this accurate planning matter?

The mistakes I’ve seen in the past have been automation for the sake of automation.

• But why do you want to automate?
• What are you going to automate?
• What business value will this give to your customers?

First, assess what you are automating. In general, if you don’t have your test cases listed or you don’t know what they are and what your first priority test cases are, you’ll probably automate a piece of rubbish. And then you’ll just be maintaining that forever with no value. Once you know what you need to automate, collaborate with the product team.

They can help you and say: “I don’t think that’s important, why haven’t you thought about this?” Or “You put it as a priority three, and it’s actually a priority one.” So, collaboration is the key.

Now, when it comes to implementing automation, the framework and the programming language, for example, should be in your sweet spot. If there’s a unison of the language, then everyone in the team can contribute.

Multiple people engaged is crucial, because your automation pack should be seen as a product in its own way. If an engineer created it, it can still be of the same type as a QA engineer or automation engineer.

Once the programming language and framework are set up, there would be a roadmap to say, “I’m not going to implement this.” Then it’s important to run automation as frequently as possible to give you data to ascertain whether you’ve automated the right things, whether they’re giving you the right results, whether the tests are flaky, and whether they are finding any problems. It’s the initial transition.

What I normally find is people jump into that last step which is to write code. But people need to walk before they can run, which is what I would recommend.

As we know, test automation cannot fully replace manual testing. From your point of view, is it possible to determine the percentage of QA activities that should be automated?

I think it’s hard to put a percentage on it, mainly because it depends on the priority. If people are doing so, they would start to automate concepts that don’t add any value.

As an example, if we automate something and it takes 2 seconds to do it manually, why not test it manually as it takes far longer to automate it, and it will take longer to get the value back?

Or if we’ve got very complex functionality where a piece of code has dependencies in 20 other areas – if we automated it, what confidence would we have that it actually tests everything? That’s where the value of manual testing comes in. And the value of somebody doing this priority testing will come in.

I don’t really like to put a value on it. For me, it’s more for what you’ve automated, why have you automated that percentage, and why you’re not doing the other 40%. If somebody can answer those questions, I believe that’s the better way of answering it rather than just a value.

Dileep thank you very much for this interview!

The post Interview with Dileep Marway on a series of articles “Agility and speed: Supercharging your business strategies with QA” appeared first on a1qa.

In this article, we’ll cover the following:

• What type of QA team to choose based on your unique telecom needs

• Best practices for working in a multi-vendor environment and addressing challenges.

Dedicated or project team models: which one is the best fit?

Dedicated (DTM) and project (PTM) teams are business models, allowing the client to expand the capabilities of the existing internal team while curtailing QA costs. A DTM fits for long-term projects with a high degree of uncertainty (e.g., incomplete or missing documentation), where the product develops by iterations. PTM is good for smaller assignments, where the amount of testing scope won’t be as broad, and the goal is clear.

For example, if a telecom company develops a complex product involving several systems and software that regularly roll out new features and needs ongoing testing, then the DTM approach is the right choice. It helps attract domain experts with the right skillset who easily adjust to all project changes, set up and monitor the testing infrastructure and processes themselves, and propose improvements where possible. However, the choice of the final team depends on the main goal. So, if the primary aim is to accelerate the release of IT solution, the organization should introduce a dedicated test automation team.

Another situation: a telco provider has a billing solution, but it’s mission-critical to verify only one of its components, e.g., performance that won’t take more than half a year. In this instance, it’s more cost-effective to consider a PTM.

Engaging only senior specialists with vast experience in the QA field may be costly, as the statistics show the annual salary reaches up to $132,000. Involving both top and junior engineers may be the best path forward, creating a balanced team that works effectively while keeping the budget in check.

Establishing a multi-vendor environment: 3 challenges to consider

Since telecom programs often require the engagement of specialists with different competencies and skills, companies outsource multiple teams. Let’s imagine that TT&A, our hypothetical telco company, turned to two suppliers simultaneously to acquire software development and QA services. Going beyond traditional workflows and operating in a multi-vendor environment, the provider here would face several challenges.

Challenge #1 Environment management

If businesses want to maintain strict coordination, they must handle all managing and controlling activities. However, they should realize that these tasks take up time, possibly forcing a distraction from their primary responsibilities.

Another option is to transfer these activities to a supplier ― here, it’s vital to opt for the one who has already worked in a similar environment and has experience in monitoring and fine-tuning the workflow processes.

Challenge #2 Synchronization of processes and priorities

If suppliers are not aware of their priorities and the requisite task sequence, it leads to a lack of synchronization, slowing down all operational processes.

Companies should clearly set goals for each vendor before the work begins.

Challenge #3 Interaction between teams

Do the outsourced teams cooperate with each other? How effective is this communication? Make sure that vendors are not working in isolation, as this results in disharmony and delays with respect to the end product delivery.

Businesses need to hold regular meetings, helping providers cooperate and discuss the challenges at hand.

5 steps to establish an effective multi-vendor environment

Here is our step-by-step plan on how to manage the work of several third-party teams within a multi-vendor environment.

1. Determining the project scope. Prior to reaching out to vendors, it’s core to define the main goals as well as the volume of activities to perform. This helps set the right priorities for outsourced specialists.
2. Establishing proper metrics. Running a project without monitoring progress is extremely risky. KPIs enable tracking both vendors and processes as a whole: companies can set up qualitative benchmarks to measure the performance of experts involved and quantitative ones as well to ensure that everyone knows the proper scope of tasks and responsibilities to undertake
3. Setting up a one-team approach. When functioning in a multi-vendor environment, suppliers run the risk of not communicating with each other. To address this problem, the product owner can create a team culture by incorporating regular meetings that allow discussing operational issues and building better rapport. This improves overall productivity and helps achieve a common goal.
4. Creating a report system. To keep the client informed about providers’ activities, it’s advisable to introduce a special procedure: each vendor makes a weekly performance report with a detailed description of the work done, problems encountered, and suggestions for solving them. This level of detail is all upside and only strengthens the process. Suppliers should also be involved in regular meetings to discuss challenges and ways to address them.
5. Managing risks. To make each outsourced company assume proper responsibility, the product owner may adopt a set of regulatory guidelines and standards as well as penalties for non-compliance.

Bottom line

Outsourcing software test requirements to a trusted QA partner makes sense for telecoms. Doing so pays performance dividends as much as it economizes telco budgets allocated for ensuring smooth product roll out. A key takeaway to remember is that the QA vendor takes care of four core aspects highlighted above: employment process, software assessment, QA activities setup, team agility and scalability.

If you’re ready to boost your telecom product quality with professional QA support and expertise, reach out to the a1qa team. We’re here to help you hit benchmarks and achieve your business goals. Let’s connect!

The post Optimizing telecom budgets with QA outsourcing: everything you need to know. Part 2  appeared first on a1qa.

To maintain a leading position in such a fiercely competitive market, businesses need to ensure each software roll out meets the highest standards of quality for their end users, and do so while staying within QA budgeting parameters. One of the most effective ways to achieve this process is by partnering with an outsourced team of QA experts.

In this article, we’ll cover the following:

• Why companies should never skimp on software quality

• How effective QA providers work hand-in-glove with telecoms to ensure best-in-class solutions.

Budgeting for QA: Stay wise when you economize

The telecom sector remains ascendant in the wake of the Covid pandemic, and continues to develop rapidly. As the tech that telcos provide to their customers keeps accelerating, so do expect end users when it comes to flawless connectivity.

This demand only reinforces the pivotal role that software testing plays in helping telecoms stay competitive. And the stats back this up: 61% of the World Quality Report 2021-2022 respondents from telecom companies state that QA has helped them enhance customer experience and security as well as achieve quality at speed.

Being complex and multi-component, effective, long-term telco solutions require adequate investments in QA. However, due to budget limitations, some companies scale back on functional software testing, which can lead to potentially devastating consequences, including damaged reputation, accelerated churn rates, lack of business growth, and worse.

Let’s consider three possible scenarios, demonstrating what may occur should you opt to skimp on testing software.

Scenario #1

TT&A, our hypothetical telco, has a billing and customer service system designed to offer a universal line of services for various types of networks. But their in-house QA team does not have enough expertise to perform full-fledged testing of the software, and it goes live with a range of critical and minor defects. As a result, churn rates balloon as unsatisfied users turn to rival IT products, shifting their purchasing power to companies whose software has no bugs and provides superior CX.

Scenario #2

In an attempt to cut corners, TT&A only conducts functional and usability testing. They decide to forego any QA tests concerning performance, cybersecurity, integration and so on. Trying to minimize QA costs, our fictional company suffered both short-term and long-term losses, because the lack of cybersecurity checks led to many vulnerable points through which hackers penetrated the system and captured personal data. And as we all know, this type of occurrence is not the work of fiction — data breaches can cost a company millions of dollars.

Scenario #3

Finally, imagine that TT&A has another telco product, designed to unite several core parts of the operation ― billing system, software for providing Internet access, accounting clients, and tracking invoices. After testing each module separately, they decide to omit comprehensive integration tests and verification. When the software was released, the system could not accurately identify users who had paid their bills and randomly cut off connectivity to certain customers.

Our examples point toward what not to do, but that doesn’t mean mitigating risk and optimizing performance requires blowing out your budget. Outsourcing QA tests to a trusted partner has been shown to drive up outcomes in software and application quality, and do so while decreasing costs.

How QA outsourcing helps optimize software testing budgets for telecoms

By applying professional expertise to the following four core aspects of QA, third-party vendors can assist telco businesses in decreasing expenses associated with assuring software quality:

1. Software assessment. Does your team know precisely which checks are pivotal for your software? QA professionals evaluate the IT product and its specifications to wisely choose a comprehensive QA strategy, tools, and testing types ― all needed to fine-tune workflows, quickly detect critical defects, and refine the quality. At this stage, experienced specialists also ensure proper test coverage through test design techniques. To verify the app accurately, they consider the specifics of the telecom industry.
2. QA activities setup. Establishing a QA process (especially from scratch) is time-sensitive and budget-consuming, involving investments in devices, toolkits, and workstations, and stopping a variety of major tasks. Possessing extensive expertise in telecom projects, third-party specialists take over the entire software testing cycle and perform all mission-critical stages: analyze requirements, plan, design, and execute tests, create reports, and so on.
3. Team agility and scalability. Let’s say your QA team consists of 3 engineers, and the testing scope is constantly evolving. How long will it take to find and onboard a new specialist? These concerns can be effectively taken off your plate — by staying agile and adaptive to the needs of the moment, a QA vendor can easily and smoothly expand or reduce the team of highly educated experts with vast experience in telecom at any time.
4. Employment process. The QA provider independently organizes the procedure for recruiting the most suitable specialists and onboarding them for the project. The annual salary of a test automation engineer is currently around $73,000 per year. When factoring this into the funds required for equipment and training, it’s easy to see how quickly costs begin to rise for a telco. A trusted vendor undertakes all these expenses, allowing you to focus on core business operations and subsequently increase ROI by producing a high-quality end product.

Source: Payscale

In Part 2, you’ll discover the difference between dedicated and project team models and challenges when working in a multi-vendor environment. Stay tuned and expect our next blog.

In case you’d like to optimize your telecom budget and refine software quality, contact a1qa’s experts.

The post Optimizing telecom budgets with QA outsourcing: everything you need to know. Part 1 appeared first on a1qa.