Guideline for successful software testing in 2017

The year 2017 is just around the corner. We guess it’s high time to remember the most common QA requests in 2016. Based on them we give our recommendations to software testing vendors to run successful testing in 2017.

Embrace test automation as integral part of testing

Test automation is still the best way to speed time to market, quickly test changes and not delay deployment.

“Today we observe the booming growth of test automation as a trend. How does it manifest? Well, obviously, clients have become more aware of the automation goals and advantages. The number of automation service requests for projects with QA in place also grows up continuously.

For the last six months we’ve received a significant number of requests to automate testing of the desktop applications (mainly for Windows). They are still not as many as the web apps testing requests but the number is very close to it. The driving force is the emergence of high quality toolsets that enable to solve complicated issues that were hard to solve before.

Mobile apps test automation has also grown in demand and this trend will likely keep gaining speed.

Open-source project Docker is used more often to speed up deployment of test environment. Docker offers to scale automation of various activities related to the software development, deployment and testing.

And the last but not the least important factor for test automation popularity is the opportunity to provide complex high quality solutions without being limited to the sets of automated tests only.

Now we offer automated solutions that are integrated with testing and bug tracking systems and enable to analyze test results. Summing up, test automation is becoming an integral part to continuous testing.”  – says Sergey Hamzatov, a1qa Test Automation Engineer.

Develop new service lines

Alongside with traditional services, we do constant research and develop new services to meet specific QA demands, for example, Baseline Testing. It enables to evaluate the current quality level of any IT product and propose a roadmap to its increasing.

Another non-conventional service is QA consulting, which is rather popular among those customers who need to develop QA processes or improve current testing strategies not to outsource testing needs on a regular basis and manage distributed teams.

Instill out of the box thinking approach

More and more often we have to deal with assuring quality of various IoT developments. They require testers to become real users for some time and try the most unthinkable scenarios. What we recommend is to start thinking out of the box.

How can a professional manual tester who runs routine tests regularly become more creative? There are some useful pieces of advice that might be of help to any tester:

• Find out what the software under test is not expected to be doing. Try those things out.
• The ‘what if’ should become the leading question of the software research. So you are finding yourself in the middle of Apple Watch testing. How will it act if an iPhone it is paired to runs out of battery, etc.?
• If you can do anything in the system (meaning it allows you to) do so without question and despite everything telling you shan’t do just that.
• If possible, get the system (or device) under test out of your working premises and try it in real environment.

Get ready for testing Big Data applications

Large companies often ask for comprehensive strategies to test big data systems that are too big in scope to be processed in traditional ways. And here again test automation comes to help us. Automation is one of the best means that can be used for testing big data apps.

Give priority to security testing

Security has been and is probably the most important aspect of any IT strategy. Nowadays we are getting ready to handle increase in systematic testing of all applications (mobile, web, desktop).

The cost of mistake also increases as users now are less forgiving of broken security. To stop the vulnerability trend, users, mobiles apps developers and testers should join their efforts. Users shouldn’t share their personal data and have to become smarter downloaders; developers must ensure the 100% code security, while testing engineers should identify threats to the app and help develop countermeasures.

We hope that our recommendations will help to shape your future plans and start efficient and productive 2017.