7 Ways to Improve Your Mobile App Testing

As mobile users are growing steadily, mobile devices too are undergoing changes with devices offering various network connection options for users along with using various OS versions and hardware platforms. No wonder mobile app testing has to combat such matrix of combinations fast as heightened competition needs mobile apps to have quicker development/release cycles. With confined testing budgets and such challenges, people often wonder how they can improve their mobile app testing. If you too belong to this league, here are some ways that can help you improve your mobile app testing effectiveness and raise your mobile app quality.

1. Testing on both real and emulated devices:

With device fragmentation being an important aspect in today’s mobile world, chances are high that your app won’t run on a single device or a screen size that’s uniform across different devices. That’s why you need to test your app with as many real-life devices as possible to check how it looks and works on different devices, platforms, screens, network connectivity options and OS versions with emulators and simulators. But you won’t get adequate confidence in your apps with just emulators and simulators. Cloud testing gives you an ideal solution in such cases by offering you real-time access to a wide variety of new, and sometimes even unreleased devices and network operators, along with inbuilt collaboration and test frameworks. You should also use scaling testing to test your apps on remote devices and involve other people in diverse geographical regions in testing along with using device farms for remote testing.

5 Mobile Application Testing Goof upsDownload this checklist

2. Stick to agile development:

A smart approach to mobile app testing involves finding the defects and defect trends early on and support rapid development cycles. So, you should adopt an agile culture to get your testing closer to being fast and more effective. Agile testing methodologies will not only improve your team’s ability to adapt to change, but will also improve stakeholder and customer engagement together with paving way for more useful documentation and creation of deliverables that are of higher quality.

3. Test automation and continuous automated testing:

By creating automated tests, you can run them more frequently as compared to human testers and even run them when no testers are available. With continuous automated testing, you can run tests automatically when an app’s source code has been updated and compiled successfully. With every change in the app, automated tests offer more traceability and visibility in the source code, thus letting developers know of early warning of failures faster. This in turn lets them investigate and fix problems quickly. To use test automation more effectively, you should choose test automation interface carefully (which could be ad hoc, publicly and officially supported, or a custom interface embedded in the mobile app). You can even use test monkeys, which are automated programs that let you test your apps.

4. Assess if your automation is delivering results:

Though automation is crucial for mobile app testing, it’s equally important to assess if you are getting the desired results from test automation. Unless you evaluate tests within a framework continuously, you may end up automating tests (e.g exploratory testing) that could have been done better manually. Measuring the value you get from test automation is also important to take the right decisions. For example, you should easily automate build smoke tests that deliver high value, while compatibility tests that are necessary could be given somewhat low priority due to the value you derive from them.

5. Using virtualized platforms and services:

Virtualizing your testing resources (by leveraging virtualized platforms and services) can cut costs in terms of setup and infrastructure, and even bring down the ongoing expenses involved. You can use virtualized test resources on both server and client sides of your mobile apps. Thus, with less costly infrastructure and hardware, you will be able to scale up or down, as and when required, which would help significantly in stress, load and performance testing.

Download Whitepaper:Security Testing Guidelines for Mobile Apps

6. Consider potential storage issues:

Despite having limited storage, mobile users these days like to install and play HD mobile games, run hi-resolution videos and photos, or use music streaming services with gigantic caches. So, while testing your mobile apps, you have to consider the extent of data your app will download to your users’ devices, and how the users’ monthly mobile data plans may get affected by the amount of such data downloads. Since unavailability of disk space often make mobile apps behave unpredictably, you should try to minimize your app’s storage requirements on mobile devices.

7. Focus on end-user experience to know about problems:

You won’t know the real performance of your app by just reviewing ratings and comments in app stores. Rather, try using modern crash/analytics SDKs that have a small run-time overhead, as they can give you real-time insights into the interaction of your users with your app apart from providing you with detailed crash reports that would help find problems immediately and fix them.

Despite mobile app testing becoming a tough proposition with the introduction of new devices with different features, you can improve your mobile app testing with test automation and use of virtualized and cloud resources together with leveraging new tools and techniques. Join hands with TechArcis and see all this happening in reality to give your app users an unmatched, seamless experience.

Top Automation testing tools for 2018 – Streamlining Industries

Now we are in an age of automation in almost every field. Software development process is leaping in terms of advancement over time, same applies to the tools and technologies. These changes are focused on improving productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction, to facile ever-shortening delivery time, and create successful products and services. It goes without saying, software testing obviously has a crucial role in attaining these objectives.

As per the latest report provided by World Quality Report by 2017-18 Capgemini focused some interesting trends in software testing and quality. And the two of the significant points worth focusing is the adoption of agile and DevOps methodologies. In the present digital scenario, every enterprise requires intelligent automation and smart analytics to gear up the decision making & validation. Not only these but in general, every online organization all the dealings need to work streamlined specifically the e-commerce relates ones. With every festivity, they provide certain offers and has to work in tandem and streamline the delivery. This helps you to provide a seamless experience to the customers – starting from giving enough choices, providing the promised discounts, and lastly delivering these within the time frame. Many of the esteemed e-commerce players have already faced the impact of the disastrous sale offer days which vividly proves the eminence of implementing Automation Testing for guaranteed performance and enhanced functionalities on the digital platform. According to the report, enterprises need intelligent automation and smart analytics to quick up decision making and validation and to address the challenges of testing better in smarter devices and products that are highly integrated and continuously changing. Furthermore, testing makes the practices address the challenges better and products become customized to continuous changes.

Download Whitepaper: Automation Testing in an Agile Environment

Well, there are few prominent tools in the market that can be helpful for the different organization for automation testing. And one of the trusted and efficient names in this domain is TechArcis which offers end-to-end testing solutions

Some of Significant Automation Testing Tools –

EggPlant

It is a test automation tool and is commonly used by testers for its numerous features which empowers them to test the use and performance of any developed application through devices and operating systems. It works with any coding language with one or more scripts, where users establish test scenarios on multiple devices and operating systems.

Ranorex

It is popular for providing innovative test automation software to different organization around 60 countries. Other than being cost-effective, Ranorex license permits effective desktop, web mobile application testing as it can effortlessly integrate with the testing environment. Along with this, it can be adapted for standard programming languages easing using it. Ranorex also supports technologies such as.NET, Winforms, WPF, Java, SAP, HTML5, Flash, Flex, Silverlight, iOS, Android, Windows Apps (Native/Hybrid), etc

Selenium

It is one of the most used open-source test automation structure for web applications. It came to the market arena in the 2000s and evolved becoming especially helpful of advanced programming and scripting skills.

It supports various system environment (Windows, Mac, Linux) and all browsers like Chrome, Firefox, IE and more. The scripts for it can be written in multi languages like Java, Groovy, C#, PHP, and Ruby.

These are three most efficient automation testing tools that make the industrial process streamline and enhances the productivity reducing the turnaround time. And TechArcis is the name that can provide complete automation-testing support with agility.

DevTestOps – Role of Testing in DevOps world

Albert Einstein once said – We cannot solve our problems by applying the same level of thinking that we used when we created them.

Though this line was said in a different context, this applies to software development as well. Unlike the past where one level of thinking (software engineering) prevailed, the present era has something completely different to work with. That’s why you will find a rapid collaborative development environment in the DevOps world where test team will have close integration and collaboration with the developers, management, QAs and IT-infra professionals. Working with such a diverse, multi-faceted group, testers can help reduce lead time, improve time to market, boost deployment frequency and deliver stable new features more successfully.

Download Whitepaper: The Role of Testing in DevOps and Agile

We put “Test” in “DevOps” and call it “DevTestOps”

No wonder that in the DevOps world, which has its focus firmly fixed oncontinuous delivery, testers have a key role to play as detailed below.

# Continuous Integration, Deployment and Delivery

Just think, how useless and meaningless continuous integration and delivery would be if you don’t have a continuous testing process to back them up. It could be bug infested or have serious functionality issues, which would make the entire process moot as you’ll have to go back to the drawing board and think afresh to tide over these problems/issues. With a group of competent testers in place, you can steer clear of such problems as you will be rest assured of being able to release the codes quickly and deliver software in a timely manner.

In the continuous integration and delivery process required in the DevOps world, the IT infra plays along with Dev and QA team. In this culture, the development team addresses the Infra issues successfully while coding and the testing team develops right scenarios along with IT infra team to validate required environment.

# Work begins right from Day-1

In the DevOps world, the testers association starts from day one and runs throughout the project life-cycle. Though some may say that the V-model has a similar structure, it’s important to remember that the Development and Testing Teams work as independent units there, which run as parallel activities. In contrast, testers are an integral part of the Dev Team in the DevOps world. The integrated teams have to clear the doubts, finalize requirements and arrive aright strategy and execution plan by having brainstorming sessions.

# Test Automation

Progressive test automation is one of the key requirements for continuous delivery. This can happen only if the Development and Testing Teams work in tandem and have an in-depth understanding of the codes – both at the high and low level design of the code.

# UX design

In the market, there are software that are good enough and then there are those that are really great. Wondering what makes the difference? Well, it’s the courage to think out-of-the-box and sometimes, even seemingly weird solutions, based on the needs of the target clientele, develop them and put them to test. After all, it’s the finer points of the user experience (UX) design. In the past, this was a time consuming task that was handled by a group of specialists. But now, you can take it as a team sport, where everyone participates and brainstorms, from developers and IT professionals to testers and the management, thus challenging what were thought to be good design rules and architecture as all this rule breaking is supported by a culture of learning and experimentation in the DevOps world. This is precisely what makes all the difference! Testers have a big role to play in usability testing as they have to find the right scenarios to test the UX. After all, it’s often a glitch in the code or design that inhibits a user from completing a desired action and it’s the testers who can fix these by addressing the functional gaps, bugs and other issues, if any.

# Ease of process, Transparency and Accountability

Compared to a few big changes, frequent and small changes made along with continuous delivery are much easier to manage. With testers in the DevOps world, you can get exactly that. Again, with continuous delivery and a diverse team at work, where everyone is familiar with the release date throughout the entire deployment pipeline, you enjoy transparency as you get a completely audit able process. This in turn helps improve your end product’s quality.

With a competent testing team in place, you can ensure that every change gets monitored as it makes its way from development to production. Since the results are out there for anyone to see, you will make lives easier, especially when it comes to satisfying regulatory and compliance committees. All of this is attributed to a continuous delivery process, which helps you to make sure that all your records are complete.

Conclusion

The DevOps world has managed to eliminate the boundaries between operations and development and interestingly, testers have a big role to play if the domain is to get robust and all embracing.

TechArcis is focused on delivering high value added engagements with measurable returns on your investment. Let us show you how our agile testing solutions coupled with DevTestOps and Continuous integration process can help you gain competitive advantage. Talk to us today.

How to Leveraging Selenium Grid in Private & Public Cloud

Selenium-Grid is a method of testing using Selenium that enables simultaneous testing on different devices running different operating systems and browsers; basically a number of machines running multiple tests in parallel. Selenium Grid has two versions at the moment – Grid 1 and Grid 2 – but the newer Grid 2 is now more widely used. It has been designed to follow a hub and node fashion, where a single device known as the hub runs the test, and the nodes are constituted of various other machines that do the execution. Selenium-Grid supports distributed test execution. Maintaining Selenium Grid Infrastructure Simplify the management of the Selenium Grid Nodes and stabilize said nodes by cleaning up the test environment after the build has been completed

Shutdown hub (with lifecycle manager)
Daily reboot your nodes (autostart server on boot)
Place all the executables/scripts on a central file share (for easy updating)
Restart hub and take Jenkins out of shutdown mode
Finish all the tests (Put Jenkins in shutdown mode to prevent starting of new tests)

How do you control Selenium Grid failures w.r.to browser auto updates?

Disabling auto upgrade
Have specific node for the specific version of a browser
Create a static environment.

Limitations & Challenges Using Selenium Grid

Maintenance is expensive–Need to maintain the health of other computer systems which run all the nodes. Certain third party libraries have limitations that prevent them from being used in conjunction with Grid.

Java process –will eventually run out-of-memory.
Nodes in Selenium Grid often end up in a bad state if left up and running for a long enough time.
Manually restarting the nodes in case of issues.
The performance of Selenium Grid is very low in case of a large number of node servers.
Scalability issues

Advanced Selenium Grid –Next level Scalability

It’s cheaper to just run your tests against Sauce Labs or Browser Stack or Testing Bot because maintaining your own Grid and a lot of different browsers and operating systems can be very time-consuming Selenium Grid + Docker or Docket Compose

By using docker, we could reduce the significant amount of effort in setting them up the selenium grid.
We can bring this infrastructure up and down anytime by issuing a single command and It is highly scalable as well.
Another added benefit to running Selenium Grid with Docker is the ability to restart the entire grid in just a couple of minutes.

Docker: What is the use of docker here? Docker is a bit like a virtual machine. But unlike a virtual machine, rather than creating a whole virtual operating system, Docker allows applications to use the same Linux kernel as the system that they’re running on and only requires applications be shipped with things not already running on the host computer. This gives a significant performance boost and reduces the size of the application – source: opensource.com Docker is a manager of Infrastructure. It will be able to package a software and all its dependencies to run as a container. You can deploy the software, packaged as a docker image, in any machine where docker is installed. It, kind of, separate the software from the hardware – so the developer/test engineer can rest assured that the application will run on any machine regardless of any customized settings that machine might have that could differ from the machine used for writing and testing the code. Managing selenium grid infrastructure was a pain. By using docker, we could reduce the significant amount of effort in setting them up the selenium grid. We can bring this infrastructure up and down anytime by issuing a single command and It is highly scalable as well. However, there is a dependency that this dockerized selenium grid should be up and be running before you start tests. Once we are done with our tests, we do not have to keep the grid up and running. Currently, as per this approach – this is managed outside the framework – either manually or some automated script.

Various Agile Testing Practices being adapted by Global Enterprises

CEO at Microsoft Corporation, Satya Nadella, has started preaching a more nimble agile implementation approach for building software, as part of the recent transformation the company has undergone. A recent survey of IT and development professionals shows that agile is the new norm. The majority of development projects and teams have embraced this new methodology while the pure waterfall model is slowly moving towards minority.

It was a little over a decade ago that agile software development first entered the scene as a reaction to traditional approaches for software development projects. While it was initially promoted as a movement, many looked upon it as a major challenger to some of the more entrenched practices such as the waterfall model. Its test-first development practices like test-driven development inspire confidence and promote simple designs. In TDD, the developer begins with writing code for an automated test case, which describes either a new function or a feature that needs improvement. Then he produces minimum amount of code to pass that test and finally refactors the new code so that it can meet acceptable standards. Testing the code at an early stage diminishes the need of excessive debugging. Another technique used by agile techniques is behavior-driven development, which stems out of TDD. In BDD developers combine ideas and techniques of TDD with object-oriented design and analysis.

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Key Testing Methodologies in Agile

Agile development involves a number of different testing methodologies. Let us learn more about them in detail.

Unit / Component Testing:

Individual software units, related data, and a number of other use procedures are all tested in order to assess how tight the operation is. With the help of the unit test, the behavior of a small piece of code- known as a unit- is tested and the tester notified whether the test has passed or failed. Automated unit testing provides various benefits which closely aligned with several agile principles. The key benefit is that it produces working code faster, with fewer bugs. It includes a collection of skills processes and tools which support agility. Besides, you get quick feedback from running tests, giving developers the ability to cover more code. And as we all know, the Agile Manifesto is all about working software. Automated unit testing makes this quicker than any other process.

Integration Testing: From the perspective of an agile workflow, the UI is bound to feature numerous experiences of changes and multiple versions with user feedback and team input being deciding factors. In this regard, test automation in UI maintenance becomes extremely time consuming. In order to enhance the overall coverage while not allowing the maintenance costs to escalate, automation needs to be done at a systems and services level.

Acceptance TDD:

In the acceptance test-driven development, a test-first approach is followed. The development team first clearly understands the acceptance criteria and creates test cases based on the bullet points that are clearly labelled in the acceptance criteria. Any modification to the same may be done by setting up a prior planning meeting in negotiations with the Product Owner.

The primary idea of acceptance test driven development involves a set of tests that should be passed before an application may be regarded as finished. It is a well-established fact that testing an application before delivering it is an invaluable practice.

Continuous Integration:

Continuous Integration is an agile development technique where code is checked in small increments and tested against the larger code base. This is a development practice that has been around for long. In fact, it has been around for so long that most developers tend to take this practice for granted. However, it has been found recently that this is not the correct practice.
The build of code is only half the battle won. A successful build will tell you that in terms of syntax, the code holds together but it won’t give any suggestion on how the code works. The practice of continuous integration should ideally involve automatic code deployment to the platform on which it is supposed to reside.

Agile teams usually have a self-organizing setup with a variety of skill sets spanning across the team. Besides using the above test techniques,developers can also use code review to learn the code base and new techniques and technologies to help grow their skill set. Code reviews can benefit every team regardless of their development methodology. With work being decentralized across the team, it provides huge benefits for the agile teams. Code review helps in facilitating knowledge sharing not only across the team but also the code base.

Conclusion

For an agile project, a number of tests may confirm that your system is working as per expectations. These are value-driven tests that also focus on value creation. Exploratory testing, on the other hand, is driven by risk and focuses on unexpected behaviors. Though the outcomes are complementary, the goals tend to be conflicting and this is something that needs to be recognized. This is why it is important to automate agile testing.

How DevOps can be game-changing for Digital Transformation Initiatives

Technologies mostly help to improve the productivity, but it is sometimes disruptive. Let’s say, a new or an advanced technology – their application, without the specific know-how can disrupt the sales scenario. Enterprises and businesses all around the world are cajoled to adopt the advanced ways to make their products and services better marketable for the potential customers. Digital transformation at its own pace is helpful in bettering the consumer scenario, and much has been discussed and written for the same.

While it’s the buzz going on around various industries as they are trying to adapt to the different aspects of Digital Transformation.

Software development and testing processes continue to evolve and get better. This makes it a necessity to work collaboratively to ascertain that the apps are developed steadfast and constant quality check is done. DevOps has become a boon in this aspect so is widely being adapted to speed-up and maintain the quality of the software application development procedure.

Why is DevOps the best practice for Digital Transformation?

One of the reports by Forbes, As per Gartner reveal that DevOps is more effective in IT sectors in balancing agility and risk. Getting the higher profiles interested has become easier by the beginning of this year as the stakeholders are well informed about the advantages.

The perfect collaboration between development and operations team can reduce the gap between both the processes of software development. It streamlines the work and increases the productivity, which leads to unhindered product deployment to various enterprises and is immensely useful in the long run.

DevOps tools are created to advance the process making it track-able for both the teams. It includes API, organizational tools, configuration management tools, application scrutinizing tools and more.

At the initial level, DevOps facilitates transformation not only for the development while being equally effective in the further process to the deployment level. Nevertheless, to make DevOps completely successful all the functions need to run collectively.

But the question that needs to be addressed is how it can be useful for Digital Transformation initiatives?

Digital transformations engulf creating applications, which can be updated faster without hindering the user experience. These consumer-oriented apps are indispensable for every sector to reach the potential audience and create a remarkable impact. This is the major cause why organizations are turning to DevOps to create advanced web and mobile applications.

Digital transformation and the necessity for incessant development

Digital transformation is fundamentally about ensuring the speed, quality, and best ROI with the implementation of the updated technology. And DevOps does the same by improving continuous development testing, and implementation in the process for building apps. Any app can be stored on the Cloud, while DevOps is required to ascertain exclusion of downtime and unhindered customer experience. Sufficing to the consumer expectations in the present condition where you entitled to minimal attention span. So it is central to any organization adopting digital transformation.

DevOps has some core features that facilitate much needed digital transformation which ensures maximum ROI generation. The key point is practicing DevOps brings together cross-functional teams that link up and streamline the different outcomes to give you the desired business results. DevOps tools are inevitable for managing the aspects, like the business performance, database, functionalities, apps and more.

Digital organizations are expected to offer applications and infrastructural ambiance in an agile, functional and prompt manner. Rather, if you trust reports, by 2020 more than 30 percent of most of the applications will be used from the Cloud which is approximately 15 percent now. This amplifies the necessity for incessant development and testing, which can be only possible with DevOps.

Digital transformation and importance of it in Omni-channel experiences

There various reasons why enterprises need to get rid of conventional IT processes and get into the advanced agile setups. With the increasing expectation and functional requirements of the users on various platform digital transformations is a must.

We can take the example of media. Innumerable web channels, web-based entertainment options like Netflix is gaining audiences by the use of various devices with different configurations. This simply makes it clear that, whatever device or platform is used, the channel has to render flawless audio-video experience to the spectators. Thus omnichannel experience is crucial for any digital initiative which can only be obtained by the collaborated effort of teams and quality analysis constantly.

Implementing DevOps practices organizations can achieve bigger goals with less impact and complexities. DevOps enterprises add to the speed, functionality and keep up the pace with the innovations. It also provides technical benefits like incessant software delivery and fast solutions to glitches, software bugs, and errors.

DevOps for Improved Stability

Getting digitally advanced naturally involves more innovation by enticing the niche audience. Keeping up the pace requires proper set-up that can offer seamless adaptation and successful outcomes.

In non-DevOps firms problem arises when a new feature is introduced in the process of production and requires to be tested for beneficial results. It is a cycle where one company releases a product or software for the use and testing by another enterprise. The concern remains how the stability of apps can be ensured in this scenario.

Whereas, organizations with DevOps teams take complete responsibility for the end results, which ensures the stability of apps, even after the inclusion of the latest features. The factors like the combination of shared codes, automated deployments, bugs and other aspects are managed and removed. This leads to speedy processing, flawless application and great turnaround time.

Conclusion: At TechArcis, we regularize efforts and assure reduced time to market with advanced DevOps Testing. Our CI testing professionals can guarantee great experience in continual testing to provide the desired outcome.

Originally Published in LinkedIn

Digital Transformation – The What, Why and How

2018 is going to be a year of digital. Every business, irrespective of the industry, is adapting digital as a core part of its functional strategy and slowly yet steadily moving towards digital transformation.

Digital Transformation – The What, Why and How

Digital transformation is the most important strategic challenge facing business leaders. ‘Born Digital’ companies are dominating business models today, offering new value to consumers and service providers alike. As a result, customer experience, social media influence, big data have gained a whole new meaning – one that has forced the companies to look at technology in a new light and integrate it with 360-degree processes. Going digital is the way for organizations if they wish to make an impact on their target audience and amplify their reach. But there is much more involved in a digital business transformation than just the end product. As Mark Sonority, the columnist at Marketing Week puts it, ‘it’s impossible to find an Archimedes point where digital ends and so-called ‘traditional’ channels begin’.

Securing the Stakes Through Digital Transformation Testing

Digital transformation promises greater yields for businesses and thus the stakes involved are also high. With so much at stake, aspects like quality assurance and testing become integral to any business’digital transformation strategy. For this, the organizations need to identify the tools and methodologies that are best suited to their requirements. However, the biggest challenge organizations face is to get the best from technology while ensuring customer satisfaction. Saul Berman, IBM believes that “We’ve moved from digital products and infrastructure to digital distribution and Web strategy to now into more holistic transformations that clearly are based on mobile, social media, digitization and the power of analytics and we think it’s really a new era requiring new strategies.” At the 2014 Accenture Technology Vision, it was declared that ‘Big was the Next Big Thing’. Besides, one of their recent studies revealed that 62% companies are investing in digital technologies while 35 % are comprehensively investing in digital as part of their business strategy. Home Depot, for example, is creating a connected home ecosystem where all the products it sells will be compatible with Wink connected home system, thereby developing potential new services and unique experiences for Wink customers.

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We’ve moved from digital products and infrastructure to digital distribution and Web strategy to now into more holistic transformations that clearly are based on mobile, social media, digitization and the power of analytics, we think it’s really a new era requiring new strategies.

We’ve moved from digital products and infrastructure to digital distribution and Web strategy to now into more holistic transformations that clearly are based on mobile, social media, digitization and the power of analytics and we think it’s really a new era requiring new strategies.”

With digital transformation testing, the goal of the companies is to ensure consistency in user experience irrespective of the medium of communication. Digitization experience across all platforms like phones, tablets, notebooks, wearables etc. needs to provide a seamless customer experience. This can be made possible by performing repeated tests to ensure that all browsers and operating systems work as per expectations. As many as 79% companies acknowledge the role of customer experience and mark it as an important consideration while testing.This aim of providing a seamless customer experience is a big step forward for most organizations and requires thorough testing and quality checks at various levels. Govind Muthukrishnan, Senior Vice President and Testing Global Service Line Leader, remarks that this year’s World Quality Report shows that we live in a fast moving world where customer experience and flexibility are as important as keeping pace with digital transformation using Agile QA and DevOps.

Security – The Driving Force of Digital Transformation

When an organization introduces digital transformation in its processes, quality assurance too becomes important. And in times companies are switching over to the digital mode in a bid to stay ahead of competition, automation testing is helping them deliver increased efficiency. According to Raffi Margaliot, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Application Delivery Management, HP Software,

“Technology disruptions such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and mobility are leading to faster business transformations than ever before. Companies have to pivot quickly in order to stay ahead of the curve, compete and conform to the new style of business”.

Organizations have increased their budget allocation for QA and digital testing and it will only go up in the coming years to ensure a perfect environment for their customers. Companies have realized that to stay ahead in the competition, they have to invest more in their IT budget. A report in 2015 found that 43% executives foresee an increase in IT spending budgets and a 9% year on year increase in the budget directed towards testing and quality assurance. According to the experts, testing is critical when going digital.

One of the biggest challenges in digital transformation is the security. Companies have to continuously invest in testing systems which ensure the integrity of their processes and applications. Digital security cannot be taken lightly by any organization that hopes to rise in business and wants to offer a smooth experience to its customers. Another reason why experts are in favor of testing is these days the product life cycle is very short and there is a demand for greater agility. Organizations are modernizing their testing processes to meet these shorter life cycle programs.

Digital Transformation has affected the way traditional business is done. There are a whole new set of processes that have to be incorporated in the system to deliver productive customer experiences and consequent business benefits. In the view of tough competition, the need of the hour is for flexible and rapid delivery of software and systems. This is made possible only through the modes of testing, which themselves have evolved to a whole new process. Test automation is not enough by itself. What is needed is its integration with development processes so that testing becomes an integral part of overall business strategy.

Aaaron Levie, CEO of Box says, ‘the Last ten years of IT have been about changing the way people work. The next ten years of IT will be about transforming your business’.

In the process of digital transformation, testing is very important so as to have the organization ready for the future. One thing is for sure – as digital transformation starts permeating the internal processes in an organization and automation becomes the norm, testing will acquire a larger role and it will grow to proportions that can not even be imagined at the moment.

Download Free E-Book: Role of QA & Testing in Digital Transformation

Conclusion

Quality Assurance & Testing is crucial and fulfills a critical role in any digital transformation journey. TechArcis understands that each industry has specific business requirements and a unique set of challenges that need focused testing solutions. Leveraging our domain expertise, leading-edge tools and methodologies, delivery model and industry best practices, we offer customized solutions for industry-specific software testing requirements to enhance targeted business performance. Our industry solutions help enterprises across various sectors keep pace with real-time requirements, address test specifications, and simulate them to the scalability of production. Contact us today!

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Crowd Testing – Inexpensive, yet very powerful way to test your apps before going live

From their inception through the design and development till the final stage, you test your products at different stages to validate they perform the right way they were meant to and meet the targeted quality standards. With crowd testing, you can cover all your bases for testing by using a number of people, system configurations, devices and networks all over the world to test your products. You surely can’t have a more “real world” testing than this!

Crowd testing intends to compliment traditional testing methods, not replace them totally. However, to deliver on its promise, the crowd involved must be able to understand the key business processes and given some specific direction to operate rather than everyone going his/her merry way. This is where you need managed crowd testing. Though you can rely on an unmanaged crowd under the theory that the technology involved will ensure quality and worker controls, it doesn’t happen so in reality. Simply put, the testers (belonging to the crowd) need to be managed by a human being, not an algorithm.

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Why use crowd testing

Crowd testing offers several benefits. For one, it involves testers from various time zones, thus making some testers available round the clock. This can be extremely helpful when you have tight project deadlines or need to test a specific functionality at the earliest.

Since you can get to use crowd testing services even on a short notice, they help when you need to get results within a few hours. In the real world, your products are likely to be used on a wide variety of software and hardware combinations than what you can test with your in-house resources. But with a crowd of testers, you can test your products across a range of software and hardware combinations together with real-life situations to spot and fix issues, if any

How we can help

If you are looking to go the crowd testing way, TechArcis – a leader in quality assurance in software, can help with: Mobile Automation Testing – How can CI and Cloud help?

Crowd testing as an add-on before production release: This would help you spot any defects with respect to configuration and residual UI. In case the crowd isn’t allowed to access your site online due to security or privacy protocols, we will help you set up virtual desktop interfaces to get on with your crowd testing project without a hitch.
Crowd testing for multivariate and performance testing: where end-users are made to select website controls or elements from a group of choices made available as part of multivariate testing based on response. Crowd testing can be leveraged effectively for performance testing as well.
Testing applications that have high business criticality and high DEF (defect exposure factor): business criticality refers to which areas, when interrupted or not performing the right way, would have a sizable adverse impact on your business. DEF refers to the number of releases every year multiplied by the number of critical stakeholder visits each day. By testing the applications that affect your business criticality and have a high DEF, you can decide which key areas your testing budget spend should focus upon as they would finally create the biggest impact on your business bottom-line.
To get crowd testing integrated into overall testing: by considering crowd testing a part of your on demand bouquet of TaaS, you can use it together with your testing tools, test infrastructure and test type combinations, thus integrating it into your overall test strategy. As businesses mature and crowd testing slowly steps into the inner circles of the testing community, we will help you meet your testing needs faster and more efficiently which you may have been currently doing by relying upon labor- and time-intensive testing methods.
Mobility testing via crowd and cloud: in today’s scenario where several smart phone devices, apps, platforms and network languages operators are available, you need to test your applications for improved time to market and ROI. With cloud-based testing which is asset light and highly scalable, businesses are increasingly using it to test their apps, either by setting up their own infrastructure or renting it from cloud testing service providers. Crowd testing is another phenomenon increasingly used in mobility testing as it allows access to a varied pool of talent from across the world who can test the apps on various devices and environments using different IDEs (integrated development environments) and scripting languages, among others.
Testing on real devices with various operating systems and browsers: rather than spending on costly test resources and in configuring test environments, crowd testing lets you get your products tested by real users across multiple OS, devices and browsers. With testers from some or other part of the world always available, you can finish a major part of your testing within days which would have otherwise taken you weeks to get done with in-house resources. Thus, with such speedy testing, you can find bugs and issues with enough time on hand to fix them before you take your product to the market.
Ability to quickly assemble 100 people team for quick 1 week of testing: with on-demand and flexibility being the key, our crowd testing services let you get a team of as many as 100 testers, who would handle in-depth, end-to-end testing within just 1 week. This would help especially when you have a tight project deadline or need to test something particular within a short period.

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Final words

If some statistics are to be believed, crowd testing offers up to 4X detection rates of issues and bugs as compared to traditional testing, facilitates up to 10X coverage, is 10 times faster and almost 70% cheaper than its traditional counterparts. So, take your testing to another level with our <span”>crowd testing services.