Over the past few decades software industry has grown by leaps and bounds, and the quality assurance landscape has changed its growth trajectory along with. The companies are investing significantly for developing their own quality assurance and quality control parameters to align with global standards. With the current change of trend in software business, QA testing has to balance well between handling business risks, cost reduction, ROI concerns, achieving business goals etc. Software testing companies should focus on adopting suitable strategies for testing newly developed software to detect bugs and reduce coding errors, which interfere with the optimum performance of the software.
Unlike the traditional way of testing, recent trend of quality assurance testing is to conduct the test throughout the development life cycle. Some of the emerging trends of quality assurance testing strategies are as follows:
Embracing early life cycle validation strategy to cut down cost and improve time to market:
This aids in detecting the bugs and fixing them early in software life cycle, which can considerably reduce the risks and lower the cost of ownership. Different methodologies for gaining traction are as follows:
- Model based testing or requirements
- Early involvement and life cycle testing
- Risk-based testing
- Risk-based security testing
- Predictive performance modeling
Improving overall testing process through improved adoption of test lifecycle management, automation solutions and testing metrics:
QA testing organizations now focus at introduction of greater quality into different applications, which is why they are adopting new solutions, like test life cycle management and automation technologies. The solutions assist in driving greater traceability throughout the testing lifecycle. These also help to automate all the lifecycle stages, aiming at enhancing overall efficiencies and better ROI.
The emergence of new frameworks and dashboards is necessary for defining, monitoring and measuring testing metrics. All these metrics ascertain faster decision making and driving greater efficiency within existing or emerging testing process, framework and solutions.
More domain-based testing:
Domain excellence has become one of the key factors in quality assurance testing industry, which drives QA organizations to build or buy platform-based or point-based solutions for easily combining core business process with advanced testing frameworks. For example, solutions for regulatory compliance for SOX and HIPAA are included within such testing creations. These also help in specialized processes, like POS, banking, e-commerce etc.
Enhancing the customer experience with the emergence of non-functional testing solutions:
Extensive use of e-commerce drives the quality assurance organizations to deploy more solutions for successfully measuring and enhancing end-user’s experience. This also imposes stress on the requirement for no-functional validation services and solutions. Key emerging areas in the non-functional testing solution includes testing for usability and accessibility and predictive performance modeling.
Development of testing frameworks for newer technologies:
SOA and cloud computing are some of the newer technologies, which set a new height of challenges to the established technologies. Since the traditional models and frameworks of testing do not work well with these newer technologies, the QA organizations are creating new models and frameworks to address the raised issues.
Special focus on ERP testing:
Until recently, the organizations used to implement ERP packages without considering the testing complexities that might emerge in future as the package evolves with changing IT environments. As a result, these packages now require specialized skills and methodologies to facilitate the implementation testing, smooth rollouts, upgradation of the package, and to achieve the business goals. Thus QA testing is undoubtedly one of the crucial features in ERP implementations and upgrades today.
A successful quality assurance testing requires proper testing approach and strategies, which should include testing parameters along with role of each person for regression, load, performance testing, etc. A company should design suitable documents for quality assurance testing strategy to get a competitive advantage over others and achieve maximum benefits from the testing resources.
Summary: With the changing trend of software products and business scenario, quality assurance testing should be modified considerably, along with specific strategies to align with the global transformation.
Credit:
Knowledge Sharing Team at QA InfoTech is responsible for research on new tools & technologies for effective software quality assurance and testing services across all industry verticals. QA InfoTech (an ISO 9001:2008 & CMMI III certified) is one of the leading Localization Testing Companies with five testing “Centers of Excellence” in the United States and India. It offers end to end QA testing services.