QASource Blog

Developing a comprehensive test strategy means never having to ask, “Where do we begin?”

A test plan vs test strategy comparison is useful in defining the role each plays in your SDLC. The test strategy defines your QA best practices. The test plan outlines how you will practically implement them toward getting a finished product to market.

Software quality assurance testing creates customers.

Its value lies hidden within the smooth flow of your UI, the ease with which a problem turns into a solution and the reliability and security that customers come to take for granted.

Software quality assurance is how you turn development innovation into customer experience execution.

The vastness of the internet rests on the myriad of individual web applications that make up its practically endless network. The ease of access a user experiences and expects belies the multipoint complexity of the underlying web server, application server and database.

Pitching a new product into this balance between complexity and simplicity requires a profound commitment to software testing.

There is nothing more exciting than your first experience of success. Watching your vision and hard work take shape and become a real product in the hands of real users can be like actualizing a dream. For many startups, those early days are about pulling together as a small, dedicated team with everyone pushing the limits of their skills and experience to produce innovation within the tightest of resource limits.

With success comes the promise of growth, and your dreams and goals become larger.

Partnership is the combination of skills and experience toward a common goal. It is the shared belief in and responsibility for a product. It is a trust that if you do your best and I do mine, we can create something unique and worthwhile.

When you engage a QA partner to share the responsibility of your software project, you get to experience all those warm sentiments of cooperation and trust. But you also get to strengthen your own development engine with the skills and experience of expert testers.

Preparation turns big problems into little ones, and it turns bug problems into little sprints.

When viewed from afar—as a single, monolithic step in your overall software development process—testing an entire application can seem overwhelming. How do you properly account for every potential execution, for every combination of platform, purpose and user? Or for every practical real-world contingency?

The choice is yours. You know your product. You know the problem it solves and why it will soon become vital to the working lives of untold numbers of users. What you might not know is how best to test that product so that your development intention becomes a product reality.

There are a number of different software testing methodologies available to you to reach that reality. Each is designed with a specific purpose in mind, and each has value in a comprehensive test plan.

For all our metrics, test plans, Agile approaches and strict industry standards, the end goal of every software development project is the same: happy customers. The user experience is our definition of success.

The designing, planning, testing and re-development that goes into an application is all there to make sure that the end user can solve their problem using our product. The challenge is to keep this goal in mind every step along the SDLC.

Do not fail because you failed to ask for help.

We all know the failure rates among startups are high. Very high. Some estimations put the failure rate at as much as 90%, which could be as many as 120,000 companies a day.

What is most concerning about those failures is how frequently they are attributed to inexperience. That might be domain inexperience, capitalization inexperience or product testing inexperience.

API vulnerabilities are potentially devastating. The programming interfaces at the heart of our internet-connected world shuttle data blindly, dependent entirely on the coding and testing standards that went into their development. The safety and security of your users’ data—and, therefore, your own reputation and brand quality—rest solely on the resources you put into testing the application.

It is a high-stakes issue, one that has compromised and embarrassed some of the biggest companies in the world.