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.
Automated quality assurance (QA) testing is a rigorous, thorough process that can help spot defects better than manual testing alone. Automated tools offer higher-quality testing, can expand your QA coverage, and can help you release software faster. If you have released software only to have customers report many bugs, consider automated QA testing. It can make your future releases better by ensuring software runs correctly, efficiently, and effectively before release.
The existence of both manual and automation testing gives the illusion of choice.
Technically, you can view them as interchangeable, that one is the faster version of the other. Once you understand how each QA testing approach operates, its strengths and weaknesses, you find there is no choice. Instead, the idea is to know when to apply them, not if you should choose one over the other.
Speed comes at a cost.
The idea of racing through the QA process and achieving time savings near the stressful end of the software development cycle is very attractive. The hard work of your core DevOps phase is behind you, and your thoughts turn to getting the product to users. So automation testing may be your first instinct for QA. Automation testing is indeed the fastest form of QA currently available, and will cut your testing time by 95%.
We all have our limitations. Every business model we use has them, as does every system we engage to guide us through software development and quality assurance. The key is to understand these limitations and to overcome them.
There’s a world of difference between “good” and “good enough.”
Think of it in end-user terms—what sort of emotional response are you hoping for when your customers get their hands on your product for the first time? You want them to be impressed, you want them to be at ease. You want them to have the best experience possible.
QASource sponsors the East Bay Agilistry & QA Meetup Group. The goal of the meetup group is to create a community where software engineers and developers can meet once a month to learn new skills, build on current skill sets as well as network with other business professionals.
