For any organisation or sector to prosper, there has to be continuous improvement on their existing products or development of new techniques. Over the years software testing organisations have taken big leaps as technology itself has advanced and innumerable applications have been evolved.
The Major Concern
The technology may have advanced, the applications may have evolved but the area of concern is, are testers still using their old testing methodologies to detect bugs in the new applications? Certainly there will be a few static tests that need to be performed for all types of testing yet the new techniques will have to chip in for a better performance. The old testers will have to either take sessions of the new advances in the technology or let the freshers take control for next levels to perform quality testing.
The Change in Testing Era
It often comes to our knowledge that the testers and development teams are not aligned with each other and hence they are always on a rift with each other. The testers detect bugs and send the application/product back to the developers to rectify and the cycle is repeated till the application is good to run in the market. There’s always a blame game happening between the teams. But, with technology taking a leap with time, the situation has changed. Both the teams work in a better synchronization and organisations team up developers and testers together in one single team thus increasing efficiency.
As Archie Roboostoff, Director-Micro Focus, U.K. rightly says ,”It is very critical that those two teams are in constant communication in terms of their tools, collaborating and then seeing what’s happening in real time, because one little miscommunication or misstep can have tremendous ripple effects downstream.”
Have you ever wondered what troubles the testers or any organisations? Well, I am sure we all have the answer – its losing the customer/users. This is one aspect that is most troublesome because losing users results in losing business. And when do we lose customers – when the performance of the app is poor! Performance is the main key for any app to hold the users and when it does not perform as expected, the user has too many other apps to switch to in the flooded market of apps. Initially checking the app for performance was in the testing team’s kitty but gradually it is falling under the developers’ team to check for the performance on a regular basis. This helps in detecting the reason of lackadaisical in the app in the development cycle hence improving performance.
Testing Applications Now & Then
“Applications are starting to become a lot more sophisticated and functional, and the need to test that functionality has become more critical. The need to constantly automate those tests and run regression testing is necessary, just as it is with desktop and Web applications,” asserts Roboostoff. This holds true because earlier there were not too many options for testing any app because of scarce knowledge of testing. But today, the generation is tech-savvy, it has emerged to understand the pros and cons of delivering a poor app, it is aware of which testing to perform with the best tools and techniques available in the market. Each testing has definite role to play, we can not single out one from the other. Manual Testing & Automation Testing, Regression Testing, Functional Testing etc are a part of any testing organization. The trick is to perform the testing as per the requirement of the app. According to Roboostoff, “Developers are starting to embrace more hybrid applications. This saves a lot of work for developers, but the problem is the burden now lies on the QA team. Where they used to have a specific application and platform from a developer, now QA teams have generic sets of code, libraries and style sheets that have to adapt to different platforms. The QA team has to make sure that the code will adapt itself to every single platform and mobile device they are going to support.”
What we can derive from the above statement is that working on native apps, developers are able to save time but the testing team has to put in extra efforts as they need to work on the platform that the developer provides, not any random. This does consume time but in turn makes the app user friendly.
To conclude, I would say that to be a successful Software Testing organisation, follow the change and keep moving towards new dimensions of testing. Happy Testing!
