QASource Blog

What happens when you can’t accurately measure the cost, effectiveness, and progress of a software testing project? A lot of less-than-ideal things. Projects can balloon in cost, creep in scope, fall in quality, or run on for what seems like forever. Without defined metrics attached to each QA project, they can get out of control -- and this scenario is a nightmare for both the product company and their team and the testing provider and their engineers.

One of the key challenges of working with an outsourced QA partner is aligning a new, offshore team with your product, procedures, and larger business objectives. Without the proper transfer of knowledge from the customer to the offshore team, engineers will be testing blindly. This leads to process slow-downs, inflated project budgets, and even lost contracts.

When your QA team is in-house, you’ve got several things going for you. First, the team is already familiar with the product and the company culture. Second, communication between the dev and QA teams is simple -- a test engineer just walks down the hall to find a developer, and vice versa. Though these are undeniably valuable benefits of having QA under the same roof as dev, experienced testing partners help bridge the gap between onsite and outsourced teams with a project kick-off meeting and several important QA processes.

Think fast! How much are repetitive manual tests costing you by the hour? By the day, week and year? Probably a lot. Certain manual testing techniques have their place in the software development lifecycle. But overall, automation is winning the day. A well-designed automation framework can boost your team’s productivity, help you release at lightning speed and, best of all, cut a big chunk off of your testing budget.

Like the name implies, performance testing provides a glimpse at how your system, network, or application performs under a certain workload or on a specific device. Quality performance testing helps ensure that your product is ready for real-world use by your customers, and that they will have a positive experience with it. The numbers your performance testing generates also serve as a baseline for improvement with each release.

Each month, our Advanced Technology group evaluates the latest QA testing tools and we help pass on their findings to you. This month, we give you a few helpful tips on creating test data along with overviews of Protractor and JNA. These updates will help boost your team's efficiency and overall productivity while keeping you in the loop with the latest industry tech standards.

We are proud to introduce QASource Shieldcast! This new QALounge feature provides a brief overview of the latest security testing tools to ensure that you are protected against overlooked vulnerabilities in your application and deliberate attacks on your system. In addition to detailing new tools and feature updates for existing ones, Shieldcast will offer tips for how to safeguard your team, their desktops, and your application.

Without high-quality defect tracking tools, monitoring software bugs is impossible. No engineer can track each and every defect in his or her head, nor with a single spreadsheet. Bug tracking allows teams to focus on priority issues that directly affect the quality of the software, and communicate about them more effectively.