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QAOps: A Software Testing Trend

Talking about development these days, streamlining the entire software development lifecycle turns out to be an extreme hustle. Especially, when you need to ensure the product developed should meet all the defined guidelines, right from the framed requirements to ensuring early and successful deliveries, quality often takes a backseat on the way to creating sustainable technology.

As per a recent article by Forbes, poor-quality software costs organizations $2.8 trillion in the U.S. alone, according to the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ). This means a product made with sacrifices on the quality aspect often turns out to be a shortsighted delivery strategy that ends up business and developers with the havoc of long-term troubles. Luckily, software testing has always emerged as a sustainable practice that has helped brands across the globe to yield technologies for life.

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Playwright vs Selenium: A Comparison

What Is Playwright?

Playwright logo

Playwright by Microsoft is the newest addition to the Headless Browser Testing frameworks in popular use. Built by the same team which created Puppeteer (Headless Browser Testing Framework for Google Chrome), Playwright, too, is an open-source NodeJS based framework. 

However, it provides wider coverage for cross-browser testing by supporting Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit, while Puppeteer supports Chrome and Chromium browsers only. Playwright is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS, and can be integrated with major CI/CD servers such as Jenkins, CircleCI, Azure Pipeline, TravisCI, etc., in addition to the testing frameworks like Jest, Jasmine, Mocha. Besides JavaScript. 

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Importance of Testing Virtual Care and Remote Medicine Apps

The healthcare industry is growing expeditiously as healthcare practitioners are looking for ways to improve patient care and give them easy access to care options while reducing the overall cost of maintaining the infrastructure.

Fortunately, digital technology has made it easier for healthcare specialists and patients to communicate with each other. Virtual care and remote medicine are breaking down the barriers that would previously prevent patients from accessing doctors and other healthcare options.

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Testing Android Mobile Apps: Best QA Approaches and Tools

What Is Mobile Testing?

Mobile testing is a process of checking mobile applications - software programs running on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices - for functionality, performance, security, usability, etc. It can be carried out with manual or automated tests. Whatever method is applied, the main mission is to ensure that a mobile app meets either business requirements or end-users' needs and expectations.

Traditionally, the following types of mobile applications are differentiated:

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Dos and Don’ts to Successfully Adopt Test Automation in DevOps

Gone are the days when releases to the production environment were rare. To outmaneuver the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, roll out software briskly while turning clients into brand advocates for life, businesses are continuously improving delivered IT products by releasing several and more times a day. 

For that, the process of ensuring high build quality should accelerate substantially and take minutes, not hours. A cultural shift to DevOps became a way out. DevOps helps to build, test, and deploy faster, provide quick incident responses, and enhance collaboration between teams while unlocking software development innovation and increasing agility. 

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The Best Defect Tracking Tools in 2021

It’s very rare to find a defect-free product. Every software application has some kind of bug crawling through its code, even those designed by highly talented developers and tested by vigilant QA teams. And these bugs can multiply quickly when a disjointed process—or worse, no process—is in place.

Perfection, of course, is always the goal when QA testing. But reducing the number of defects within the system while adhering to tight deadlines and lean teams can make this goal seem unattainable.

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7 Ways to Improve Testing Efficiency in Application Development

A familiar situation: the application scales, and as it grows, the costs of testing and quality control increase — costs increase, but problems remain. A competent QA specialist will immediately understand that such a deadlock has arisen due to the absence of a clear strategy. Without such a strategy, managers can inflate the budget as much as they wish, but it won’t bring the expected positive result.

There are several methods that help to organize the testing process, make it more flexible, save money, and improve results. Let's consider them in this article.

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Unique Features of Mobile Testing

Many mobile development and testing teams agree that it’s inaccurate to think of mobile applications as the same software running on a smaller device. Indeed, mobile application testing services differ greatly from any other project type. Here’s how we see the unique traits of mobile software testing.

User Expectations

Mobile software is called mobile for a reason: these applications are expected to work on the go, anywhere, and at any time. Furthermore, accessibility is a key distinctive feature of mobile software. The different physical interactions that users have with their mobile devices change a lot for developers, UI/UX designers, and testers. At the same time, the global trend of digital experience personalization also added its twist to user expectations from the software they choose to install. When personalization meets accessibility requirements, demands for project testing teams can get out of hand.

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The Difference Between Junior, Middle, and Senior Developers

Introduction

It isn’t all about years of experience a software developer has, but their mindset, the skills they developed, and the knowledge accumulated along the way. Obviously, senior developers possess far better coding skills and more knowledge than junior and mid-level developers, but even the most inexperienced junior can sometimes provide your software development project with something a senior won’t be able to.

One of the biggest skill and knowledge gaps between junior and senior developers comes from how they approach writing their code. A senior developer writes simple, straightforward code with maintainability and scalability in mind. They think about the long-term impact of their code on the further development of your software and the people who will have to work with it. Junior developers, on the other hand, just want to make the code work. Their code is usually overly complex due to the lack of understanding of the whole picture behind the project.

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Mobile App Performance Testing Checklist

The market is filling up with mobile applications more and more. According to Statista, in 2016, the number of app downloads was approximately 140 billion. In 2019 this number increased up to 204 billion and in 2021 this rate is keeping growing on. At the same time, competition among companies is growing too, and users raise their requirements for app quality. Poor quality products vanish from the market, and their owners go bust. That's why mobile app testing is so important because it allows us to predict failures and avoid losses.

What Is Mobile App Performance Testing?

So mobile app testing is a process of testing that is conducting in a simulated test environment to ensure its functionality, convenience, usability, and quality requirements.

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Tackling Design Debt With Carefully Considered Design QA

Quality assurance is a vital part of any software development project. QA encompasses the entire software development process from defining goals and commitments to release management and smoke tests. Using different approaches, standards, and models such as ISO 9000 and CMMI, your quality assurance team constantly reviews and audits the software solution you’re developing to verify that it meets the set quality requirements. The team makes certain every feature functions as expected and prevents any deviations or potential errors from making it into the release.

Be that as it may, not every quality assurance procedure gets the same level of attention in the world of fast-paced, iterative software development and delivery practices. Today, tech companies quite often trivialize the role of UX/UI designers in the verification and validation procedures despite design verification being a critical component of the development process. Companies tend to prioritize a faster time to market, putting all the focus on optimizing performance and functionality over polishing the design. This means that while the general acceptance criteria are met, the broader user experience issues — inconsistencies between mockups and the developed UI, possible interaction and navigation deviations, etc. — are usually left unattended or postponed in favor of functionality checks.

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What if the Customer Can’t Reproduce Your Bug?

Software quality assurance and testing is a complicated procedure that requires dedication, technical expertise, an eye for detail, and hours of work. Testers are people who dive deep into your product and have a major impact on the final project outcomes. That’s why it is so important that the product owners understand well not only the importance of software testing but its pain points from within for more effective communication. Today’s post focuses on bug reproduction issues that usually remain behind the scenes for everyone but testers, which isn’t always good for the whole software project quality.

“Can’t Reproduce” — What Are We Doing Wrong?

Many software testers sooner or later face a problem when a customer/their team can’t reproduce a reported bug. A bug that you spent time and effort investigating. You tried so hard to report it back clearly and concisely, and yet they throw the “can’t reproduce” verdict in your face.

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How We Managed to Transition to Remote Work Seamlessly

In this article, we wanted to tell you about how we quickly and successfully adapted our workflows, communication, and other routines to the COVID-19 self-isolation measures. The pandemic has truly reshaped remote working. And even though there were numerous articles on the topic over the past few months, now that the work is finally done, we have the time to share with you our own experience.

If you’re used to office coffee, enjoying it while having a friendly chit-chat with your colleagues at work, then being transitioned to remote work from home out of a sudden and without any preliminary preparation can be a truly stressful undertaking. That’s why the first thing we did was making sure our employees are well-informed of the changes to come. 

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How to Communicate Effectively as a QA Manager

QA Managers are responsible for providing frequent and consistent communication for each member of their team. Celebrating the teamwork, treating team members with respect, and providing them with specific and actionable feedback is critical when trying to facilitate a productive environment. A productive environment can enhance the overall morale of a team and contributes to a healthy culture.

QA Managers must make communication a top priority. Ensuring their team receives clear goals, consistent and constructive feedback, and cross-training teams are all very important communication strategies for the managers to keep in mind. It’s also important that QA managers build empathy across teams. A great way of doing this is by paring testers with developers so they understand each other’s roles and responsibilities.

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How to Reduce Software Development Cost

Software development can be tricky. Whether your goal is to build commercial off-the-shelf software or a custom software solution, it can become a huge challenge and quite an expensive one if you are not sure how to do it right. 

In this post, we want to highlight some thoughts on how to approach the development stage to significantly reduce software development costs without compromising the quality of your future product.

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Sanity Testing vs Regression Testing

Have you ever faced a notion of “sanity” in the course of software testing? What is it? Why do we need sanity testing? Where did it come from and how is it connected with regression testing?

If you are a project manager or team lead it is important to understand clearly not only how to use the test technique, but also when to apply it. For example, sanity testing is a tool with major benefits, which is comparable to regression testing due to many common peculiarities and the same final purpose. It is the reason why PM should know the differences of each method to involve a test team properly and to provide it with a respective tool not to waste a project time and budget.

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Difference Between Black-Box, White-Box, and Grey-Box Testing

You can never be sure about the quality of your in-development software unless you test it first. Conducting a thorough analysis of whether your software meets all the requirements, whether it is secure, responsive, complete, and easy to use is crucial to avoiding technical debt and making sure your software is well received after the release. And this is exactly what testers do for you. 

Software testing is a process of investigation. A tester pushes your software through a great variety of tests to catch any hidden errors, unpredictable behavior, or functional inconsistencies. After every test, a tester files a detailed report that helps developers fix all the exposed issues, maintain the software error-free, and make sure it runs as intended.