The great software testing modernisation – where are you on the journey?

Is your software testing lagging? We often hear that software testing services simply can’t keep up, creating a bottleneck and causing delays in product delivery.

With advancements in automation and wide adoption of agile practices, quality assurance teams are under a lot of pressure to deliver quicker results. The days of development teams writing code for months and then passing it off to a QA team are gone. Now, we’re all embracing some form of agile development, which is based on iterative development and collaboration between self-organising cross-functional teams. This approach has been shown to produce better results, and many organisations have invested time and money in transitioning to it.

However, the truth is most companies are only automating the delivery pipeline, with a primary focus on speed with little thought towards quality. The problem is that today’s traditional manual testing methods inhibit development speed and impact quality. Testing teams no longer have weeks to test, but only hours.

Where is your organisation on the great software testing modernisation journey?  Are you finding yourself stuck, continually asking the same questions or facing the same problems?

• How can we simultaneously improve quality, reduce costs, and shorten test cycles?
• How do we create the appropriate test environments and data?
• How can we change the business mindset that testing is just a hygiene activity that occurs post-development?
• We are struggling to create test automation that delivers positive business outcomes.
• We don’t have the right combination of skills to execute the complex task of ensuring software has excellent usability, functionality, and security.

Now is the time to modernise our testing practices or be left behind. We need to be more intentional and very specific about end-to-end coordination of quality processes and continuous integration of testing activities from development and delivery. To start the journey of modernising your testing approach, Experis testing services recommends focusing on the following 4 key areas to reach your destination of the ‘great software testing modernisation’:

1. Integrate testing with Agile

Your company’s adoption of Agile may be causing testing to become a bottleneck. Testing is often scheduled at the end of sprints, which can make it difficult or even impossible to finish all testing within a sprint – especially regression testing. Enhance your testing practices with a ’shift-left’ mindset using TDD, BDD, and/or ATDD. Unit testing provides the most effective way to prevent defects, increase and maintain quality.

2. Accelerate with automation

Test automation should be your primary focus when modernising your testing. Automated software testing is more effective and efficient than manual testing, and it also provides better scalability and reliability. In addition, freeing your manual testers to focus on other tasks, such as exploratory testing, can add even more value. Our test automation services can provide a collaborative, accelerated approach to test automation, making your transition to automated testing simpler.

3. Continuous testing with DevOps

DevOps can help your organisation speed up its deployment frequency, creating new builds on a daily or even hourly basis. Continuous testing is essential to fully adopting DevOps, and by administering tests continuously throughout the software lifecycle you can identify and fix functionality, performance, and security related issues before they cause delays in your release or cost your business money. We can help integrate your testing process seamlessly into your CI/CD pipeline.

4. Stay current with modernised technology

You need to ditch those old, outdated applications and replace them with newer versions that utilise the latest technologies. These new applications require comprehensive testing, which is best done in the cloud. The cloud has many benefits for testing, including easy availability, high scalability, and low cost. You can test web and mobile applications in different environments and on multiple machines without having to build your own infrastructure. Let us help you by bringing our testing best practices and latest tools to the table. We can evaluate tools and select a cloud-based testing platform that will help you achieve an effective DevOps delivery pipeline.

Conclusion

If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to adopt next generation software testing practices that enable you to test early, often, automatically, and continuously. Experis Testing Services can help you move away from dated and disparate testing tools and processes to more Agile methods that make it easier for IT staff and business stakeholders to collaborate. This will lead to faster software delivery and better business outcomes. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you improve your delivery capabilities.