Today, technology is helping to close the physical gaps between distributed teams. Thanks to the cloud, people are able to access the same information from wherever they are, across all of their devices. Edits and updates are synced automatically, and everyone sees the same record of truth, resulting in a greater degree of insight and transparency.
Product companies in the collaboration space—think co-working, document management, and project management application—continue to innovate, uniting remote teams and boosting their productivity.
Collaboration services allow teams to harness the power of the cloud, but there’s a caveat—it’s a highly complex space that relies heavily on API integrations, tight security requirements, and optimized performance. This means that QA testing in the collaboration space is more important than usual, and that it comes with several pain points.
Let’s see what those are, and how to effectively tackle them:
Security
With user data being transferred across many different integrations, ensuring its security is the key. Before testing begins, clear cloud testing security standards should be defined so that your entire dev and QA team knows what they are accountable for throughout the software development lifecycle. Learn more about security testing here.
User conditions
Collaboration means diversity—users on different devices, screen sizes, bandwidths, and operating systems are all accessing the same application. Without proper testing, the user experience can be inconsistent and spotty. This means that testers need to define appropriate parameters and test with compatibility in mind.
Third-party integrations
As mentioned above, collaboration products thrive on integrations, like APIs, single sign-on, and more. Detailed product knowledge is required to anticipate the latent defects that can crop up within such complex integrations. If left uncovered, these can fester and become much worse, harming the quality of the product, hurting the user experience, or even compromising the security of user data.
Performance
For those of us fortunate to have a fast, stable internet connection, using a collaboration product is simple and quick. But what about users with slower connections? Applications should go through a thorough suite of performance testing, with tests that include large file uploads, various file type uploads, network throttling, and more.
User restrictions
Because collaboration apps are accessible to a countless number of users, ensuring the proper permission settings is important. Your QA team should be addressing all possible user scenarios in their test cases to guarantee that the right people have the right access within the product.
Testing tools
Finding the right domain experts for testing in the collaboration space is one thing, but you also need to equip them with the right tools for the job. For performance testing, compatibility testing, and security testing, there are a wealth of powerful solutions to choose from. If you’re unsure where to start, you can consult with your QA partner—an experienced one will be able to help.
Infrastructure
People tend not to notice great tech infrastructure when it’s there, but they’ll always notice when it’s not. You should aim to seamlessly connect your development and testing tools, and have plans in place for when you’re migrating from old tools to new ones. Additionally, you should have some idea of how that same infrastructure will scale in the future. With a smart QA team on hand and best-of-breed tools at your disposal, you’ll be able to ease the pain associated with infrastructure expansion.
Grab your free guide to learn more about testing collaboration services products!
