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.
No automation service ever left a comment in a report that read: “Think we could do better here.” When you test using binary software, you get left with “yes” or “no” answers—never insights.
Automation plays an absolutely critical role in your software testing, but it does have its limits. To push beyond the functional criteria of “it works” and into the user experience simulation of “it is worthwhile,” you need to engage the human element.
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.
To butcher a racing analogy: there is as much time to be saved in avoiding the brakes as there is in flattening the accelerator. Android automation testing itself will save developer-hours on the release cycle, but to really get to market faster, we need to implement the kind of Agile testing environment that prevents delays and slowdowns.
Just like in auto racing, our Android automation testing is about achieving balance between speed and overall performance—or in our industry, between speed and quality.
User interface testing is the greediest stage of your QA process. Manual testing is a time- and resource-consuming process and, hence, can push your product release cycle.
Unfortunately, it is one of the few phases of QA that cannot be completely solved with an automated testing silver bullet. Even the accelerating technology of AI in automation testing still requires engineers to manually identify UI elements before automation test scripts can be run.
There are, however, ways to capitalize on automated UI testing that may boost your competitive edge.
Time, cost, and quality. These three elemental forces of software development influence every aspect of our QA process. They are the practical realities that, ultimately, determine how we prepare a web application to meet the expectations and needs of our users.
Each point on a web application testing checklist has to be assessed in reference to the timelines of our release cycle, the constraints of our budget, and the rigorous nature of the testing needed to ensure a robust and satisfying final product.
User interface testing is your opportunity to walk a proverbial mile in your customer’s shoes. It is the phase where you have to put aside your intentions and focus on the market reality of your product. UI testing prioritizes the results that matter in the end: the customer’s experience of the product.
Selenium is one of the great success stories of the open source era. The web app testing framework has been with us since shortly after the turn of the millennium and has grown to become the dominant QA tool in its field.
It is a symbol of the revolutionary potential we all once saw on the internet, a free tool built and modified by and for a community of developers that stretches around the world.
