Category Archives: QA

The Vital Role of QA on Your Next Project

Quality Assurance (QA) testing is vital in achieving any software product’s technical requirements, development, and design. Testing helps deliver high-quality applications with few errors. Moreover, QA testing enhances the software’s accuracy, efficiency, and usability. As technology evolves rapidly, users increasingly demand excellence in performance, reliability, and usability from software applications. In this ever-changing software development landscape, Quality Assurance (QA) becomes indispensable.

The Importance of QA

Enhanced Product Quality

QA helps identify and rectify defects early in the Software Development Life Cycle, ensuring that the final product meets or exceeds user expectations. QA teams contribute to the software’s overall excellence by conducting thorough testing and implementing best practices.

Cost Savings

Detecting and fixing bugs during the early testing phase is far more cost-effective than addressing them post-deployment. QA helps minimize the risk of costly rework, customer dissatisfaction, and potential legal issues, ultimately saving time and resources in the long run.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

High-quality software translates to satisfied customers. By delivering reliable, user-friendly products free of glitches and errors, businesses can build trust and loyalty among their user base, increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

Risk Mitigation

QA helps mitigate the risks associated with software development, such as security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and compatibility issues. Through comprehensive testing and risk assessment, QA teams identify potential threats and take proactive measures to address them before they escalate.

Compliance 

In industries where regulatory compliance is mandatory, QA ensures that software products meet the required standards and guidelines. By adhering to industry-specific regulations, businesses can avoid legal repercussions and maintain their reputation in the market.

Collaboration between development and QA teams

Also, collaboration between development and Quality Assurance (QA) teams is crucial for smoothly delivering high-quality software products. This partnership enables transparent communication and efficient processes and guarantees that the end product aligns with user needs and expectations. 

Early Involvement for Proactive Issue Identification

Engaging QA teams from the outset allows for the early identification of potential issues, enabling proactive resolution and preventing defects from proliferating throughout the development lifecycle.

Alignment of Efforts for Efficient Testing

By understanding project goals and priorities, QA teams can tailor their testing strategies to focus on critical features and functionalities, ensuring efficient use of resources and faster time-to-market.

Fostering a Culture of Quality

Collaboration between development and QA teams promotes empathy, trust, and teamwork, fostering a quality organizational culture.

Continuous Improvement and Innovation

The exchange of feedback and lessons learned encourages constant improvement and innovation in development and testing processes.

Conclusions

Remember, the success of your software relies on its quality and timely launch. Quality assurance staff play a crucial role here. When choosing a partner for quality assurance, trust recommendations, and expertise. 

At Oktana, we have a proven track record of working with different companies. Recently, we partnered with a US Fintech and implemented an automated QA process, introduced best practices for quality assurance, and optimized time management to detect bugs promptly. As a dedicated staff augmentation team, we seamlessly integrate with our customers’ operations and have strong collaboration and alignment.

Contact us to explore our services and discover how our extensive knowledge at Oktana can assist you in launching a successful project.

QA testing methods for better products

Agile processes inspire a more collaborative environment for the design and release of digital products. This methodology, particularly popular among tech and innovative entrepreneurial companies, brings a new high-speed workflow that companies must be able to meet. In this context, QA testing methods are more important because of their ability to increase efficiency and improve work processes within the tech industry. 

QA testing

Having consistent QA testing procedures will increase your customers’ satisfaction, which will be reflected in long-term commercial relationships. QA has a direct impact on revenues, so it’s important that leaders include QA engineers in the entire process of digital product development. A strong QA team provides a wide range of tests that make sure digital products work, and saves companies a lot of money and working hours. Let’s go over some of the QA methods our team applies.  

 

Smoke testing

Smoke testing is very helpful to review whether the most crucial features involved in an app or software are working properly. It’s a primarily scripted testing method that provides a quick big picture view of your digital product. Smoke testing aims to ensure overall functionality.  It’s a useful starting point to get the bigger picture of the digital product and proceed with other more specific methods. It’s also a source of data to decide if it’s time to continue to production or conduct other tests.  As part of our QA strategy, we perform smoke testing all the time with Tok, our Chatter messaging app. This is particularly helpful to ensure our new versions are 100% ready to be released in AppExchange. 

 

Regression testing

Regression testing requires tests to be performed for every single area of functionality for the app or software after a change has been made. When bugs are found and the team does their best to fix them, the programming code changes. Each time the code is changed, it may impact other functionality that wasn’t supposed to be affected and may result in new bugs that need to be fixed. Regression testing helps us trace any unexpected impact from alterations. We helped Zola, a wedding registry, planning, and retail company, to test their web and native mobile apps. Regression testing provided great results and new learnings for both of us. 

 

Sanity Testing

Sanity testing is not performed to verify the core functionality (such as regression testing), but to double-check the rationality (sanity) of the digital products. It focuses on one or two (or a few) sections of the software. If any of them doesn’t retrieve the expected result; then the build should not continue with more rigorous procedures that may demand an extra investment of time and money.  This method is characterized as being narrow, deep, and normally unscripted. 

 

Exploratory Testing

This method encourages the QA team to “explore” the application and play around with it to identify and report any possible bugs. Test cases are not required in advance. Actually, experimented teams use it to gain time before the Requirement Documents are not available yet. We are not talking about a lack of procedures; we are talking about the possibility of discovering, learning, and executing tests simultaneously. That’s why exploratory testing is widely used in agile environments. We highly recommend this method in your testing strategy because it uncovers issues that another functional testing wouldn’t be able to, it puts an emphasis on the UX, and trains your team to become more intuitive and creative.

 

Other tests: 

Besides the three methods listed above, others may be included in the test plan according to the QA engineering criteria and, of course, the nature of the digital product. Here are some of them: 

  • Unit testing, the core of QA testing: This procedure aims to isolate functional pieces of code and test them separately. This way, the QA engineer makes sure every single part of a system works properly. This first scan provides predictability for the QA team to test at a higher level. 

  • Integration testing: When programmers write code, it interacts within a more complex system and those interactions must be tested with the same strictness. So, after unit testing has been successfully conducted, isolated functional pieces of codes are tested together. 

  • Stress-testing: Facing the unexpected is a part of life and it’s necessary to embrace it. Even though a digital product was thought to meet some criteria, it’s very likely that during its life cycle, exceptional situations will be presented. The QA engineer pushes the software to its maximum potential to discover bugs or points of improvement that are hard to identify in regular scenarios.  

  • End-to-end testing: In this type of test, the entire application or digital product is tested from a user perspective. It aims to analyze all possible ways a user can interact with the digital product and then, identify and register every point of improvement. The user is the center of this testing method, so the data reported can be particularly useful for the UX strategy.

 

Our commitment to QA testing

Because we have helped a lot of customers build and boost their digital products around Salesforce, we understand the importance of QA testing. Having a strong QA process not only means meeting our customers’ expectations but also implies money and time savings for our company. Tok, our Chatter messaging app, and other Lightning web components remind us every day that QA testing is a procedure that never ends, but is worth all the time and energy we put into it.