QASource Blog

For product companies, there’s never been a better time to be in the market for QA. Similarly, there’s never been a better time to be a QA engineer. Companies are releasing high-value products that shape the way users engage with the world, and they need high-caliber testing to protect customer experience, stakeholders and their market share.

Effective QA is not made or broken by any one thing. Rather, it’s a combination of all the right stuff: knowledge transfer, skilled engineers, great team culture, and the appropriate testing methodologies. When all of the checkboxes are marked, the result is a successful project and a stronger product that’s ready for market.

There’s a lot of talk on the streets about automation. But trust us when we say it’s more than just a hot buzzword. In fact, test automation is one of the most effective solutions you can adopt as a growing product company. Speeding up slow, time-consuming manual testing is one of the biggest value propositions for automation -- but what are some of the other reasons why so many of your colleagues (and competitors) are buying into it?

When your QA team is in-house, you’ve got several things going for you. First, the team is already familiar with the product and the company culture. Second, communication between the dev and QA teams is simple -- a test engineer just walks down the hall to find a developer, and vice versa. Though these are undeniably valuable benefits of having QA under the same roof as dev, experienced testing partners help bridge the gap between onsite and outsourced teams with a project kick-off meeting and several important QA processes.

Good question! But unfortunately, choosing the perfect test automation tool has little to do with playing favorites and everything to do with requirements and the various parameters you’ve set for your project. In terms of language, the closest we’ll get to “favorite” is “most widely applicable” or “commonly used”.

The quarterly security expert series from QASource delivers the best practices, latest updates, tips, and the knowledge required for security testing of applications, be it web, mobile, or desktop.

Networking conferences and meetups for coders are a dime a dozen. But where can a software testing professional find a place to meet, network and learn from fellow QA engineers? If you’re anywhere near Silicon Valley, you’ll find it at the East Bay Agilistry and QA Meetup Group.

QASource sponsors The East Bay Agilistry & QA Meetup group. The goal of the meetup group is to create a community where software engineers and developers can meet once a month to learn new skills, build on current skill sets as well as network with other business professionals.

Think fast! How much are repetitive manual tests costing you by the hour? By the day, week and year? Probably a lot. Certain manual testing techniques have their place in the software development lifecycle. But overall, automation is winning the day. A well-designed automation framework can boost your team’s productivity, help you release at lightning speed and, best of all, cut a big chunk off of your testing budget.