QASource Blog

Quality is the true measure of product success. Poor user experience or application performance negates any advantages you achieve in delivery speed or production cost. Put simply, if it does not work, it is not worth producing. It is, therefore, critical to our product success that we can accurately measure and track test results to ensure our testing is delivering against our business goals. Understanding software quality metrics, especially in automated testing, helps us identify what is working well and what needs improvement.

Are you doing all you can to make your software stand out? Every day of every year, 6,140 new software apps are released on Google Play for Android alone, according to Statista. Switch to the Apple app store, and you will find a further 1,434 added daily. And that is just the mobile market. Those are the raw numbers behind the clichés we hear about “ever-increasing competition” and “rapidly evolving markets.”

Every software development conversation you begin should end with a word on QA testing. The two have become inseparable within the modern SDLC. They are the twin forces that give the Agile approach to software development the strength to dominate product delivery in the digital age. Development innovation is strengthened by continual testing. QA becomes more effective when deployed earlier and more often.

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.

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.

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.

Automation requires a lot of manual effort. Before you push a single test case through the precision rigors of an automation test suite, you have to account for and describe every potential. Machines are tools. They are not thinkers. They do not recognize the genius in your coding or the end-user experience at the market edge of your product. In fact, no matter how strong your code is, if you do not have the right test automation framework in place, your test will be brittle and it will break.

There is a threefold way to improve the value of your QA investment. Stacked one atop the other, these three elements combine to make your software testing faster, better, and more cost effective. The strategy looks like this: Taking advantage of test automation saves you time. Outsourcing that test automation to a QA expert increases your test coverage and improves the quality of your product. Engaging a QA expert located offshore dramatically reduces your resource cost.