QASource Blog

Before the benefits of automation tools were as commonly recognized as they are  today, CTOs, product managers and engineering leads were slowed down by repetitive manual tasks, bottlenecks and miscommunication across teams. True efficiency and innovation was a distant goal, something they could only discuss in abstract terms without understanding the value of certain services in software testing.

Today, product companies strive to lead in four key areas: innovation, efficiency, accuracy and speed. Automation advantages in software testing are designed to place more power in the hands of developers, QA engineers and IT leadership.

An agile team that operates without continuous integration is like driving a race car in first gear. Your team can still make it to the finish line, but deploying to market will happen at a speed that works against best agile development methods and against your business goals.

Continuous integration was made for agile lifecycles. What team doesn’t want to deploy smaller code changes and catch more defects earlier in the development process? What team wouldn’t benefit from reducing backlog, increasing transparency and launching stronger product quality?

Continuous integration puts you back in the driver’s seat, and the leading CI tools accelerate how quickly error-free products move to the market.

There’s a reason why so many teams choose to follow agile engineering best practices. This streamlined process for software design and development delivers value in a variety of ways,  including:

Thanks to artificial intelligence, impossible ideas of the past have become the reality of today. With AI, we have discovered more about the greatness of outer space as well as the micro-complexity of diseases and the possibilities for more value remain endless. In everyday life, we interact with AI when talking to our smartphones, shopping online and streaming our favorite TV shows and songs.

So, it should be no surprise that software QA is quickly shifting towards integrating AI in QA testing. In fact, the AI industry is rapidly growing year after year and predicted to be one of the biggest software testing trends of this year.

Time to market and superior quality are the two key factors you need to lead in the digital industry today. The most diligent development teams take many steps to shorten their product release cycle in order to improve productivity, reduce time-to-market, and drive workforce efficiency.

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.

We are all in this together. That is the accepted philosophy that underpins the continued growth of the software development industry’s twin 21st-century efficiencies - Agile and DevOps.

What is less recognized is the role QA plays in enhancing the flow of innovation and production within the two models. Quality assurance testing is the common link that ensures continuity of purpose through the entire product journey from inspiration to end-user experience.

The Agile testing environment creates strength in numbers. It aligns the talents and vision of your entire team to ensure the promise of your product becomes a market reality.

Every stakeholder in your software development life cycle is involved from beginning to end. You can maintain an end-user focus through the development and analysis of daily builds using a cyclical, continuous integration model.

Teams exist in every organization. They discuss tasks that need to be completed, who will be given ownership of each task, and then they are off and running. Cross-team collaboration brings members with different areas of expertise, knowledge and experience together, which can improve quality, speed and the company's overall productivity. Cross-team collaboration is a much-needed skill that is, unfortunately, difficult to acquire. So, how can companies build effective cross-functional teams? 

As separate development and QA teams merge together to form larger DevOps teams, the Agile process is getting more play than ever. Working in an agile way encourages teams to iterate in parallel-to test code as it’s written, so as to uncover any major problems earlier on in the software development lifecycle. The Agile process was an answer to the slow, outdated Waterfall method, in which products were developed in fits and starts, with various delays and blockages slowing the entire process down.