Why Software Testing services are important for business?

Compressing the software testing concept in a couple of short sentences is quite challenging. The skillset of quality assurance engineers and testing itself as an industry is constantly evolving. There are more than 150 types of testing and still adding. That is why there are lots of misconceptions even amongst testers themselves. The importance of software testing is quite often underestimated. Let’s figure it out why such approach is risky and why a software testing is so important for business.

1. Greater customer satisfaction

The most well-known definition of Software Testing describes it as a method to check whether the actual software product matches expected requirements. But from the business point of view the goal of testing software is not to find defects (so-called bugs) or to make a software better. It is aimed to reduce risk by proactively finding and eliminating problems which would most greatly impact the customer experience. So, the quality assurance process helps to eliminate greater business risks in future.

2. Significant cost reduction

Defects detected at the early stages of software product development cost much less to fix that the same bugs caught after a product has been released. So, having testing in your project can save money in the long run. Furthermore, quality assurance saves your company from spending on legal expenses, primarily when the product does not meet the industry standard.

3. Cyber-attack prevention

The digital era we live in makes us to pay a greater attention to cyber-security. People take care about protecting their personal information, digital credentials, and sensitive data. That’s why customers look for a trustworthy software product especially when it comes to keeping data safe. Sometimes even the smallest security issues have made a great negative impact to businesses around the world, so it should always be important to assure top-notch quality products to customers.

4. Accelerated time-to-market

Velocity plays a great role nowadays. In order to match the pace of this fast-moving ecosystem, software delivery cycle has to be accelerated, but quality standards still should be kept at the high level. In fact, quality matters more than ever nowadays, because of market high competitivity. Software testing and software development if run in parallel, can accelerate the development process and make it more efficient. Staging the design process in a way that makes it certain that both software testing and software development are happening simultaneously takes care to avoid pitfalls in software development.

To sum up, testing in software development is a fundamental process of creating reliable, user-friendly, trustworthy from a cyber security point of view software products.

Kilk QA team provides a comprehensive quality assurance process starting from QA consulting and test strategy creation to its execution and reporting about defects that have been found. Contact us to learn more.

7 ways to improve software testing

The main goal of testing software is not to find bugs or to make software better. It is aimed to reduce risk by proactively finding and eliminating problems which would most greatly impact customers using this software. They can be impacted by the frequency of an error or undesired functionality, or by the severity of the problem. So, the quality assurance process helps to eliminate greater business risks in future.

The way to create high-quality software is to organize an effective QA process and to choose the right tools and methodologies for building bug-free products.

In this article we are highlighting some of the best practices of the software testing process improvement and increasing the quality of software products.

1. Plan before you start. Quality assurance process should be well-planned, defined, and documented. Good documentation is the tool that builds efficient communication within the software team. So, effective planning entails creation of quality and test plans for a project. The main documentation in the QA process includes test policy, quality management plan, test strategy, test plan and test cases.

2. Choose an effective test management tool. Test management tools and systems are software products that help QA teams to get the testing process structured and manage it more efficient. Such platforms can be integrated with your test automation frameworks, CI/CD tools, bug tracking tools, and other software solutions.

3. Use code quality measurements. To achieve desirable results, make sure your quality objectives are measurable, documented, reviewed, and tracked. There is no right and wrong right way to measure code quality. The best advice is to choose metrics which are simple and effective for your workflow and matches project’s goals.

4. Promote innovations. As much it is appreciated to follow important testing structures along with quality metrics, it is also endorsed to think out of the box. A great way to promote innovation is to automate the monotonous processes and that sufficient time can be saved and used wisely.

5. Optimize the use of automated tests. Test automation saves time, reduces human errors, improves test coverage and test capabilities. It provides faster feedback, reduces expenses, and increases the overall software efficiency.

6. Report bugs effectively. A good bug report will help in making software testing more efficient by clearly identifying the problem. It should navigate engineers towards solving it. Bug report must be a cornerstone and an efficient form of communication between a QA specialist and developer.

7. Establish an effective communication. Collaboration between testers and developers can help in improvement of the software testing process. Being in touch with developers and discussing any issues, bugs and confusion can help in making things, processes and the product better. It is important to keep a record of all such discussions.

Every software product is unique, and there is no unified approach which would work perfectly good for all projects. At Klik QA we consider all the project details and nuances to ensure thorough testing and to make testing process straightforward and transparent. With an emphasis on time-bound delivery and customized solutions, our quality assurance services help our customers to manage the quality of their deliverables while keeping costs low.

What is Smoke testing: the brief overview

There are more than 150 types of Software Testing. Let’s take a closer look at one of them with a quite unusual name – smoke testing.

What is Smoke Testing?

The term “smoke test” originated in the construction industry. It roots in the practice of construction workers injecting smoke into water pipelines to validate that they do not leak, which helps avoid floods.

In software development this term applies to tests which are designed to perform a quick check of the most critical functions. In other words, it is a kind of basic, non-extensive software testing practice, where you put the code developed so far through fundamental, ‘happy path’ use cases to see if the system breaks.

Achieving a level of certainty about the basic but fundamental functions of a product or system enables the project team to move forward.

What is Smoke testing focused at?

Smoke testing checks the core functionality of a program, to ensure that the program is ready for further testing and helps to bring out the simple yet critical bugs. This prevents the whole quality assurance team from attempting to run a full test of software that can’t complete basic functions.

Some of the capabilities tested during the smoke test phase often include access to the application, logging in with a set of users (admin, regular user) and main modules of a particular application, and more. Getting the identified issues fixed becomes the programmer’s top priority.

If smoke testing is not performed, certain critical bugs would not be found and might become a showstopper in going forward for other testing processes.

Smoke testing features and advantages

A smoke test that can be executed manually or can be automated based on the test requirements should:

Be quick to run.
Provide broad coverage across the system.
Be runnable by developers as well as part of the quality assurance process.

Advantages of Smoke Testing:

Minimize the integration risk.
Improved quality of the end-product is improved, as it is likely to uncover both functional errors, architectural and component-level design defects.
Error diagnosis and corrections are simplified.
Faster troubleshooting of new and regression bugs.
Higher productivity of the QA team.

To sum up, smoke testing needs to be executed on every build as it assists software testers in identifying defects in the early stages. It offers a simple, straightforward yet supremely effective option to speed up finding bugs. Developers and others alike can use smoke tests in software projects, and can dramatically improve code quality.