QASource Blog

QA managers are tasked with continuously finding ways to improve quality assurance and overall software integrity, but are also asked to find ways to increase productivity of team members. But, between rounds of testing and writing up issue reports, there never seems to be enough time to carry out these changes.

Increasing productivity of your QA team doesn’t have to be difficult. Targeting easy wins allows for more time to implement additional tactics that improve team productivity. And since there are a lot of tasks that QA teams tackle, increasing QA productivity can help successfully drive a company’s revenue growth.

Here are 6 ways to increase productivity within your QA testing team:

Healthcare applications must process a huge number of transactions and a massive amount of patient data each day. To ensure that all this data is handled appropriately over time, it is integral that test cases for the healthcare application apply data sets of varying complexity.

To save time and resources, consider implementing test automation where possible. But what is test automation? And what benefits of automation in healthcare can your team expect?

Most healthcare enterprise applications are loaded with critical data related to patients and the various organizations they serve. This can include health records, payment information, account details, and identity details. Due to the incredible sensitivity of this data, thorough software security testing is a necessity for healthcare applications so that critical information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

By “wrong hands,” we mean criminals in the identity theft business, hackers skilled in malware and phishing schemes, and cyber-attackers aiming to hold critical files or your entire system hostage by ransomware.

You cannot overstate the importance of speed to market in your business these days. With the pace at which digital technology is advancing, you have to do what it takes to stay ahead in the game. Never has the first mover advantage been so critical.

QA test execution can only be as strong as the strategy you have in place. One of the best QA practices we’ve noticed across many software companies actually happens before any testing begins. By implementing a strong plan with thorough processes, every member on your QA team knows what to deliver, when to deliver it by and why it's important. 

But how do you know if your strategy is sound?

When you think of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, the first to come to mind is Salesforce. That’s because the biggest players across all industries - from cybersecurity and medical technology to financial services and retail - choose this CRM solution to sustain customer relationships. And because Salesforce is designed to help businesses deliver personalized experiences to every customer, companies of all sizes can implement CRM tools in their sales, marketing and commerce practices.

Salesforce tends to win over its competition in the CRM space because of its customizable implementation and integration with other applications such as service cloud, security, outbound messaging, Apex programming, web portal, web services, social media and data loader - just to name a few.

The customer experience begins when a product works. Functional testing is the way to ensure that happens. Since testing affects the overall SDLC, developers must implement functional testing as quickly and efficiently as possible. That means automation. Specifically, automated functional testing tools.

So which tools should you use, and how?

Every delay you incur on the way to market shrinks your potential audience. Being late, or even just being second, means someone else gets the first chance to impress your potential customers with a solution to their problem. You may have the superior product, but if the first application a customer tries is “good enough,” you may never get the chance to prove you can do things better.

Your automated testing plan is a guide to saving money, releasing on time and producing a high-quality product. It is your best opportunity to get a top-down view of the project that is about to roll out. Before you become submerged in the day-to-day of test cases and iteration flows, you have one last chance to identify how you can deliver against your business goals in the most efficient manner possible.

It is the perfect time to call on some expert advice.

The vastness of the internet rests on the myriad of individual web applications that make up its practically endless network. The ease of access a user experiences and expects belies the multipoint complexity of the underlying web server, application server and database.

Pitching a new product into this balance between complexity and simplicity requires a profound commitment to software testing.