Quality delivery comes with making quality assurance a priority. However, if you are undertaking manual processes to deal with the complexities of testing for quality, functionality, and bug fixes, your project may be facing unnecessary delays. Adding to this is the need to test under multiple use cases, extend the tests to all branches and entities, and conduct tests at different levels to increase capabilities for new features. You will also be faced with capacity shortages because there are limitations to the number of manual tests that can be carried out by your team members in a day.

Manual quality assurance also faces challenges as you scale up the product or add more features and functionalities. There would be a greater requirement for manual tests and teams would be forced to hire new members or reduce the number of tests. While the former may not be possible due to budget constraints, the latter will end up compromising the quality of the product.

While it is important to find the balance between quality delivery and timely delivery, here are a few ways in which you can cut down on QA time and ensure shorter release cycles:

Test Automation

An automated test is a code that can be written to automate manual tests. It needs to be written only once but can be executed any number of times. In addition to helping you shorten your release cycle, test automation also has a number of other benefits.

While automating tests, keep these points in mind:

• Defining the product clearly and knowing exactly what the requirements are will make it easy to code application codes and automated tests without the need to be rewritten with changing requirements.
• Finding the right balance, even in automation, is essential. Don’t automate anything without considering the practical benefits of cost and time.

Continuous Testing

Continuous testing is important for a strong Agile-DevOps practice and is key to development and testing at a rapid pace. Implementing the steps of continuous testing successfully also lightens the burden on QA and takes your product faster to the market. Also known as shift-left testing, it aims to improve quality, shorten long test cycles, and reduce the possibility of defects in the production code.

Continuous Testing needs to be carried out simultaneously with:

• Continuous Development or build automation and test-driven development (TDD)
• Continuous Integration (CI), a practice where a version control system is used to integrate their work frequently
• Continuous Delivery (CD) where delivery of new functionality takes place within minutes 
• Continuous Monitoring, aided by monitoring tools to mitigate the risks involved in continuous development

Test Performance Analysis

Test performance analysis involves the study of the test approach and method used for the project using test metrics. It helps you to get an idea of how well a certain process has worked for the project, including details of:

• How long it has taken to execute test cases
• If and where test executions have failed
• How many resources are being utilized, and for how long in the QA process

Armed with this understanding, along with feedback from clients and team members, you will be able to continuously finetune the testing and quality assurance strategy for better results.

CloudNow’s testing and QA services

At CloudNow, we developed a strategy to help a large global bank reduce their release cycles and resolve their testing and QA challenges. We did this through: 

• Automated test runs that ensured quality delivery
• Functional and regression testing that improved quality
• Periodic sprint reviews that enabled coordination between QA and Testing

Streamlining the QA process, continuously finding better ways to test, and coordinating between teams, all in the attempt to improve the quality of your product and ensure timely delivery that keeps clients happy – it can all be overwhelming, and even a little intimidating. That’s why, at CloudNow, we offer end-to-end testing and quality assurance services so that you can stop worrying about these details and focus solely on your business! Get in touch with us today!