QASource Blog

There was a time when we lined up on a Friday to draw enough cash from over the bank counter to see us through until Monday. Now it is quite possible to go entire weeks without using cash at all.

The digital transformation of business has raised consumer expectations such that they expect to be able to pay for everything—from pizzas to plane tickets—without having to open their wallets. The demand for truly secure, effortless, seamless, faultless digital transactions puts pressure on developers to produce perfect POS software.

We are in an open-source revolution, an era where engineers and developers around the globe can collaborate and invest their time and money with the goal of producing a reliable product – a software that would further push the world toward digital innovation. Because of this common end goal, open source tools are gaining popularity in developer communities and more are turning toward adopting open source tools to build their product.

As developers, you are not judged solely on your end product. Every step along the way to delivery is monitored and measured against software quality control standards. All your engineering processes, methods, activities and work items are subject to scrutiny. In today’s environment, you can get it wrong even though you, ultimately, got it right.

In the realm of quality assurance, the expectations are that we understand both the need for and the burden of meeting such high software quality control standards. We also know that the way you design your software quality control plan is critical to your professional success.

There is a better way to test.

Every step of your software testing process contains hidden efficiencies that can help you achieve even better results, faster. Some are the result of planning, some stem from test design and some you realize through better test execution.

All improvements come with experience. When you have automated more than a million test cases, you learn what works and what does not. More than that, you learn what works best.

Free often comes at a cost. In terms of open-source test management tools, that cost is the quality limitation placed on your QA. Even the savings you seek by choosing a free test management source disappear if a critical bug is missed, your launch date is delayed or you are forced to make expensive fixes later in production.

While the well-established open-source test management tools have survived a decade or more in the software testing industry, their role has been greatly reduced. The simple irony is, it is hard to achieve maximum QA value with a free product.

Software testing best practices are considered industry constants wherever the constraints of time, quality and resources apply. They hold up regardless of the actual values assigned to each of those boundaries.

Wasted time will delay release cycles regardless of the SDLC timeline.

Compromised quality affects users regardless of your company’s reputation.

Wasted resources mean reduced efficiency regardless of budget.

There’s no denying that automation and automated testing is winning the day. For teams using the Agile method, automation is the only way that repetitive testing can keep up with the pace of the team. It’s faster, more cost-effective, and less prone to human error, and it’s essential to running a large quantity of tests across a variety of different platforms in little time.

All that being said, there’s still a major case to be made for manual testing. Manual testing is really the only tried-and-true way to test for the end user, and it’s still worthwhile for any product company designing and delivering to humans.

Enjoying the advantages of offshore QA solutions should not mean you have to compromise your software development best practices. QA is a critical component of your SDLC, but it is not the only component that is important to integrate with your current development cycle. Similarly, while your QA team may be able to guide and optimize your testing requirements, they are not the sole stakeholders in your product’s success. Within this collaborative effort, your test management system aligns QA with other departments of SDLC.

So, do not feel the need to give up your test management software of choice in order to access offshore QA testing and its attendant time, cost and quality efficiencies.

This is how important software quality testing is to the success of your product—40% of tech startups fail because of poor or absent QA. Failing to implement one of the fundamental aspects of software development can sabotage your all efforts.

Now, if you are reading this, then the chances are good that you will not be making the mistake of bypassing QA all together. More likely, the danger you run is not optimizing your software quality testing for consistent results that deliver a quality product to your users.