QASource Blog

The financial services sector is constantly evolving. Increasing investor scrutiny, changing market trends and constant technological developments have made it imperative for financial institutions to harness the latest technology to provide quality customer service.

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:

An Agile test strategy will help you sleep better at night. The collaborative approach to QA exposes your software to the best possible minds and lets you relax, knowing your product is the responsibility of experts.

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.

Since the advent of the Agile method more than a decade ago, many have come to assume that the advantages of iterative development are available only through face-to-face conversation within the same room.

During that time, offshore QA testing has matured to offer the expertise, resource savings and flexibility that make it a foundation of modern software development best practices.

Agile and offshore are two of the most exciting ideas currently filling the QA space. Both practices offer software developers production efficiencies and comprehensive product advantages that are becoming industry standard.

By combining the two, you get higher-quality results faster, cheaper and with a better focus on the user experience.

That is a lot of promise. Can you really depend on an offshore Agile test automation service to deliver?

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.

Agile teams produce better products because they see the bigger picture. Involving those with a business perspective along with your technical team during the software testing process helps maintain focus on where all the hard work is headed.

Adding an expert QA team to that mix only improves matters. Now, you have a diverse range of skill sets, experience, and perspective to round out your product offering.

What’s at the intersection of development, QA, and IT operations? DevOps! When we say DevOps, we’re describing the Agile relationship between your dev organization (including QA) and your IT team. DevOps is transforming the software development lifecycle, enabling teams to work faster and in closer collaboration. This relationship was borne out of a need for increased development and testing speed and high-quality products that delight customers and contribute to the rapid growth of the businesses that build them.