Which One Would You Prefer? Manual or Automated Testing

The bugs, errors or flaws in a software application have a huge impact on the user experience, hence its popularity. So most enterprises, nowadays, deploy a dedicated team of software testing professionals to ensure that their applications are flawless. But most businesses find it a daunting challenge to choose the type of testing that effectuates the process of testing the software. As an enterprise has option to test the software manually or automate the testing process, it becomes essential for it to choose the right testing option. However, an enterprise can always consider automating its software testing process to avail a set of additional benefits.

Six Reasons Why an Enterprise Should Opt for Automated Software Testing

1) Quick and Effective Software Testing
Your testing team may need additional time to set up the testing environment and test cases. But they can complete the testing project in a quicker and more efficient way after writing the test cases. Further, the test cases can be reused to conduct regression testing each time the code is changed. Further, the testers are not required to submit the same information again and again, or remember to run specific tests. You can always consider test option to beat competition by launching the software on schedule.

2) Reduced Testing Cost
You can further curtail the project cost by automating the testing process. While automating testing process, you have to initially invest in software testing tools. But these tools can be used in the longer run to test several software applications. Further, the tools work much faster than human beings, while identifying defects in the software more quickly. Thus, test automation will help you in saving both time and money.

3) Visibility of Results
Unlike manual testing, automated testing allows the test results to be viewed and accessed by several persons at a time. As the manual tests are conducted by individual testing professionals, the results cannot be viewed by others during the testing. But testing systems can be accessed by multiple users at a time see the test results. Thus, test automation makes it easier for your business to enable the members of distributed teams to collaborate and deliver high quality software.

4) Keeps Testers Motivated
While testing software manually, testing professionals often feel bored after completing the same task again and again. For instance, many professionals find it boring and frustrating to fill out the same set of forms repeatedly. But test automation saves professionals from carrying out same tasks again and again. They have to put time and effort initially to write test cases. After writing the test cases, they will remain committed to the process by reusing the cases to carry out repetitive tasks.

5) Option to Test Things Not Possible Manually
In comparison to automated testing, the scope of manual testing is restricted. In addition to being quicker to run, the test cases further enable professionals to test certain things that cannot be tested manually. For instance, test cases can be written and used to decide if the software application can process a specific number of transactions at a time. Likewise, test cases can also be used to check if the application can be accessed simultaneously by a higher number of users. Also, these aspects of the software can be tested effectively without putting any extra time.

6) Wide Variety of Software Testing Tools
The availability of a wide variety of testing tools and frameworks has made it easier for enterprises to automate their testing efforts. A business can further use open source software testing tools to identify the defects in an application without investing extra funds. Based on the nature and requirements of your software, you have option to choose from a number of popular software testing tools like WinRunner, LoadRunner, WATIR, TestComplete, HP Quick Test Professional, IBM Rational Functional Tester and Visual Studio Test Professional.

However, it is always important for an enterprise to decide what, when and how to automate software testing. Also, it must choose the right software testing tools to automate the testing more efficiently.

You can hire testers from top offshore software testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide software application testing services. If you would like to hire software testers from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.

Implementing Agile QA Process on Scrum Projects - 6 Best Practices

Before discussing the 6 best practices of implementing Agile QA process on Scrum Projects, let us discuss at first what Scrum is. Scrum can be defined as an Agile approach of software development that puts primary emphasis on delivery of valuable features of business in short developmental iterations that vary from two to four weeks. The teams generally have two specific characteristics that define their skills – they are cross functional and self organizing. Cross functionality of the teams makes sure that they have the skill as well as the expertise of doing the necessary jobs and the fact that they are self-organizing means that they figure out the process that will be the best to do the job.

Now going back to the iterations, as and when they start to flow for a particular team, the team is subject to a new kind of pressure. They are required to maintain a strict deadline (that varies from 2 to 4 weeks as mentioned previously) while testing as well as delivery of the software.

Under such pressure of production along with delivery, the teams cannot rely merely on their old practices of programming, but have to innovate newer practices. The coding practices need to become more agile, as well as capable of changing things faster, and sooner. This is where the Agile teams make a difference. The Agile teams have discovered that the code is more extensible and with low defect, with the simplest of robust designs working for the features that are currently being implemented. Hence, it has become almost a daily routine to find an agile team that has come up with several non-XP customer practices that make things easier. Let us discuss 6 best of them as per the priority list.

1. Ensuring that the SMEs and the members of business team have the knowledge that is needed

This particular practice categorically makes sure that the staff who are involved in quick iterations are experienced and experts in the practice, so as to quicken the iteration and reduce the customary delays. For instance, a member who is representing financial customers needs to be absolutely familiar with the requirements of those customers.

2. Enhance migration to Agile concepts by using various Agile terms as well as examples

Specific Agile terms and examples need to be used for enhancing migration to the Agile concepts. For instance, terms like requirements need to be replaced by user stories, while the ones like Project Management Office need to be replaced by terms like Agile Center of Excellence.

3. Creation of a physical environment or ambience that is conducive to the concept of collaboration

There should be a common practice of co-locating the team in a room where the members can meet and can interact with each other unabatedly. There are, however, other ways of enhancing the collaboration and that include reorganizing office spaces and using tools for connecting remote staffs.

4. Identification of measurable outcomes of what one needs to accomplish by using Agile

This is another very effective practice that yields the best results. A very pertinent example of this practice is the creation of a vision statement of project outcomes instead of outputs. Vision statements may include decrease in the amount of processing time by a specific amount during a set time and outputs may include the total amount of code that is produced.

5. Negotiation for adjusting the oversight requirements for a more Agile approach

This is another practice that helps the team in adjusting the oversight requirements with the use of frequent as well as tangible demonstrations for gaining the trust of the investors as well as the reviewers, thereby potentially reducing the requirements of the more official oversight database as well as documents.

6. Accelerating the delivery with the use of the latest automated tools

This is another practice that is one of the best, especially when it comes to tracking various software modifications along with the compliant development sites that help customers to conceptualize the software in a domain that meets the required security as well as the architectural benchmarks.

You can hire testers from top offshore software testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide qa and testing services. If you would like to hire software testers from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.

Justifying Real Acceptance Testing

Testers have always been involved in testing and bringing to their clients varied applications that have been tested over time. This means they have immense expertise as well as knowledge on the applications which they have worked on in the past. In this day, one now has to move into the areas of user experience for testing. UAT or user acceptance testing was mostly done by short test cycles in tandem with BSAs, from where the test cases were brought ahead. However, it is the difference that comes on board which makes all the difference, so let’s take a look at how real acceptance testing can be justified.

How it goes

In traditional testing mechanisms, when the development was over and done with, traditional testing took place. This was logically correct, since testing something when it existed made more sense, and specifications could be sought as well as obtained. The codes then can be tested well and the verifiers would come out with real time results too.

Acceptance testing has changed that all, but is somewhat alike to what test driven development in sync with acceptance test driven development was. Both have tests written before the code can be brought in. However, here instead of the static document being written or a specification for the same being shown, one can have a specification which is executable and on which codes that run can be written too. The codes can be refined as well as re-factored.

With acceptance test driven development, testers now have change of work. They do not need to be around when a cycle ends, but are there right from the beginning, contributing at every step and stage. They help well with small teams, when one cannot afford to bring on board a business analyst that would be dedicated. This would be best as an idea which would help smart testers work and help, and they can keep in touch with the end users too. With them around, real time feedback comes across, which means more productivity at work.

Is it testing or not?
TEST is spoken off but it hardly is a test, say experts. Call it a tool available for goal facilitation if you please, it is a communicative method bringing everyone under one umbrella. Whatever is desired would be defined in ways non-ambiguous. When tools such as these are used, sharing with members in the team is easy, and across various languages too. Hence, no barriers or hurdles to deal with.

It allows you to focus on the problems as well as to come up with solutions. This would allow you to reap many benefits ahead, and to write important features which focus more on solutions. Yes, it takes a little time to learn a skill but the upside is that one doesn’t have to be a genius to go forward on the learning curve.

Moreover, with the tool, one doesn’t have to deal with too many documents, literally. The feature has source codes that live close to the other codes around, and none of them are dead or outdated.

The whole team can now collaborate as well as work for higher output using real time testing, right from the beginning to the end. Silos are prevented in doing so, irrespective of the team size. It is a natural way to bring the whole team together.

Team size can be small, because of the executable specifics along with the way the software works which helps pass specifics at the end of the day. Only a small number of men and women are needed to make things work using this tool, not a large group. One can sit to describe the wants while another person can work on execution.

To learn more about real acceptance testing along with how it can benefit your company, take a look online. Read reviews, client testimonials and understand the nature through which it brings revenue to businesses across the globe. Thanks to modern day technology, business owners now have more options to unburden, and this is just the tip of the ice berg which brings in more.

You can hire testers from top software application testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide software testing services. If you would like to hire software testers experts from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.

Software Stress Testing Protects Enterprise Apps

An organization has option to evaluate the quality of an enterprise application through both manual and automated software testing options. But the test strategy must consider evaluating both functional as well as non-functional aspects of the application. Along with the look, feel, features and functionalities of the software, it is also important to test beyond its normal operational capacity. Software stress testing is used to determine the stability and operational capacity of an application.

The key objective of the non-functional testing is to ensure that the enterprise apps do not crash in the live environment due to insufficient memory, disk space or other computational resources. Along with considering the correct behavior of the enterprise application under normal circumstances, the testing further aim to protect it in production environment by emphasizing on availability, robustness and error handing under a heavy load.

How to Protect Enterprise Apps in Live Environment through Stress Testing

Finds Critical Memory Problems
Often enterprise apps crash due to lack of adequate memory. But the flaws will not reflect in a single instance. So stress tests need to be carried out constantly to find the critical memory problems and concurrency bugs. A simple and straightforward stress test is further effective in identifying all flaws that makes the application crash. The QA engineers can simply keep on putting additional load on the server to decide the stress level required to make the software crash.

Automate Tests
The application needs to be tested repeatedly and beyond its normal operational capacity. Unlike load testing, stress testing aims to determine the load under which the application crashes, along with what causes the failure. So the testing must be carried out continuously to ensure that the app does not crash in live environment. As the test cases need to be executed repeatedly can be automated to get better results, stress testing can also be automated. An organization also has option to choose from several stress testing tools to save both time and effort.

Continuous Integration
Along with stress testing automation, an organization also needs to concentrate on continuous integration. As most enterprises do not automate the deployment process completely, the chances of human error increase substantially. Thus, continuous integration becomes essential to minimize these potential manual errors. However, an enterprise has to invest in custom hardware to facilitate continuous integration. But the tools and hardware procured for stress testing automation can be used to integrate additional tests at the enterprise level.

Deploy Developers
In addition to the hardware, continuous integration will further require the involvement of developers and operations. The automated tests must be developed and coded properly. Similarly, the hardware must be maintained on a regular basis. So each organization has to make and implement a continuous integration strategy by involving the app developers, QA engineers and operations. The seamless coordination between these distinct teams will make it easier to decide the load under which the application crashes.

Keep Adding Heavy Load
The stress testing can be further effectuated by putting heavy loads to make the enterprise app struggle. It is always important to keep in mind that the stress testing software applications are being executed with the sole aim of making the app struggle as the load increase. Along with increasing the level of load applied on the app constantly, the stress testing needs to be done again and again without allowing the app to recover even once. The performance of an application under heavy load can be determined accurately only by trying to break it.

However, stress testing must be integrated seamlessly with load, fail-over, reliability, baseline and targeted infrastructures to generate more accurate and reliable test results. The test results can also be used to take several important decisions related to the launch and promotion of the specific enterprise application.

You can hire testers from top web application testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide QA testing services. If you would like to hire software testers experts from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.

Understanding of Improvements in Software Testing Process

The major purpose of software testing process is to find bugs and hence it is considered to be a part of software development life-cycle. There are also a number of other factors of equal importance that have considerable contributions in terms of completing testing performance. Software should comply with all the technical as well as business requirements. Thus, validating and verifying software with more improved understanding of the performance testing is indeed essential in order to ensure that it properly works without any issues.

Steps to improve Software Analysis Method

The following measures are sure to help your company improve software testing procedure.

• The first thing you must consider is to have complete or thorough understanding of projects that your software testing team members are handling. It will be good if testers are able to attend meetings, discussions or conferences concerning their project.
• Make sure that your team members are ready for changes. Although there is a test plan for every project, it can be changed at any point of time to follow the cutting edge technologies and novel evaluating methods.
• You are recommended to think well before implementing any alterations into your plan to avert making blunders.
• Try not to shunt within your team of software testing. Assign your project managers throughout the duration of the full project execution.
• First important step is to recognize the platform on which the entire application will be running.
• Examine current requisites of the management activity for checking whether all functional as well as business requirements are being tracked in the control system of file-level version including Team foundation Server (TFS), Visual Source Safe (VSS) and many more.
• QA team must be involved in every test phase starting from requirement gathering to the software development life-cycle.
• Keep record of every possible scenario before writing of test cases is started for adding them to the test planning.
• Written test cases must be reviewed by a QA team specialist.
• Generate periodically or weekly test reports for clear understanding of software testing like effort variance, bug find rate, residual defect density, test case effectiveness, schedule variance, etc.
• Make separate QA environment to replicate the production environment.
• After every release, a retrospective or post release meeting must be conducted for the testing and development team to participate and discuss about the good and bad points concerning the projects.

Ways to Improve Agile Development Methodology

Improving test skills of your testers is equally important as improving the test process. With the following measures you can enhance the software analysis procedure.

• Make sure that your testers have in-depth knowledge of the application process they are handling.
• Try to provide friendly vibes between test and development team for the elimination of personal reasons related to inadequate bug fixing.
• Accept the fact that no tester can provide 100% bug free applications.
• Knowledge of application does not mean anything without your testers' domain knowledge.
• Provide your testers with the ability to take part in different working seminars and training programs.

These days, many near-shore development organizations use outdated agile testing practices. As a result, end users get poor software or applications with lots of bugs along with insufficient user interface. That is why it is truly important to improve both testing process and testing skills. The overall software test procedure is actually a constant improvement process. To enhance the procedure the effort of either a single person or the test team is not only responsible. The combined effort of the development team as well as management must understand the value of improving the test method while identifying several areas that need changes for better performance.

You can hire testers from top software regression testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide software testing services. If you would like to hire independent software testing experts from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.

Top 6 solutions to avoid software testing failures

During the application of some product under some environment, if there are certain defects then wrong results will be produced by the system which leads to testing failures. While the software is being designed and built, a programer makes some mistakes. There are some defects which may not lead to failures as they stay inactive and are hardly noticed. However, problems will be bound to crop up at some point or the other which makes it extremely essential to ensure that the testing procedure is carried out with utmost care and precision. While embarking on the evaluation procedure there can be many problems to be overcome- whether or not the budget will be overrun, etc. To avoid software testing failures as much as is possible, you can adopt some preventive measures. Here are the top 6 measures that you can follow.

Defining project success as well as the method to measure it- It is very essential to keep in focus the clear objectives and goals of the project or software. While doing that, you should be taking some basic factors into consideration-

• Time- Some or rather most of the projects run on a tight schedule with fast and hard deadlines; this fact should be made very specifically clear to everybody involved with the process in the first place. Interim deadlines should be set up; rewards may be given for meeting them.
• Cost- The planned as well as actual cost should be tracked properly. You should also decide that in case there is some work outside the original planned scope, there should be some means to reject or approve the cost.

Defining functionality- To determine the kind of testing needs to be carried out the kind of work that must be accomplished by the system needs to be described. For that read all text requirements, review the screen mockups as well as provide feedback along with clarification. This may be time-consuming and iterative but cutting it short is not a very good solution as that will also mean cutting short or decreasing the probability of success of the project.

Identifying correct team members- There are various roles in each phase of any project, so when choosing your team members for the testing process make sure that they are fully qualified for a particular step and that they know which segment of the process they are in charge of. Assign individual roles for each and make sure that they stick to it.

Testing- Whether a system is working or not according to the design is the main objective for determination in evaluation processes. The evaluation method should be such that it gives you quantifiable results; so choose accordingly. Some test plans created define all “use case” while some other test plans created by companies just test against some particular required document.

Deciding on the method of communication- This process is such that there is need for perfect communication with the team members at all stages so that maximum positive result is yielded without the wasting of time as well as money. So it is essential to be on the same page and be up to date. Decide on the method for communication as well as the frequency.

Putting off pressures and celebrating interim successes- Testers often face inappropriate external pressures from stakeholders and managers which force them to cut corners and ultimately compromise on the quality of the product that reaches to the consumer. However, this might lead to bad reputation as well as harm of goodwill of the company in the market. It is not harmful to remind of the pressing deadlines but sometimes it would be beneficial if few pressures are taken off the shoulders of the testers. It would not be harmful to encourage by celebrating interim successes; rather it would boost the morale and make them work better, faster as well as more efficiently.

So try to identify, understand as well as avoid a few common testing problems so that the process becomes smooth-flowing. Not only will it make everything easy, but it will eliminate chances of cost escalating as well as delay in project delivery.

You can hire testers from top web application testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide software application testing services. If you would like to hire software testers from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.

Mastering Performance Testing in an Agile Environment - A Unique Challenge

Testing in the agile environment is growing popular and it is actually a challenge for the quality assurance teams to work in accordance with the present development trends. Now, performance testing is carried out using various methods and tools. Effective testing depends on quite a few factors such as the skills of the agile tester, the tools that are being selected, the approach that is being taken and so on.

Testing Skills

To begin with, for any agile tester, it is necessary for him to be acquainted with a number of tools and techniques, precisely all that are usually implemented. All of the testers are important, as they take equal part in the entire procedure of testing. Subsequently, a thorough understanding of the areas and domains that are being developed is quite essential. The necessary skills usually involve a knowledge about the tools that help in developing tests, which ultimately lead to a meaningful feedback.

Test Automation Tools

Apart from having the basic skills, the members in a testing team should also be aware about the right automation tools, without which everything can actually go wrong. Getting the right tool requires one to take note of the following requirements:

• The tool should be OS friendly and should support as many operating systems as possible.
• The cost of the tool should not be as high as to go over the stipulated budget of the enterprise.
• It should be easily understandable as well as effectively navigable. The user interface should be such that even a person with little knowledge can handle it without trouble.
• Those that come with a code less architecture are preferred because these reduce the necessity of writing codes.
• The tools must lead to quick results as well as reporting abilities for the testers to be able to respond to the requirements of the particular environment of agile testing.

The Agile Testing Environment

The development environment, consisting of certain things ranging from the rather simple machines to the cloud environments dealing with external services, must be checked by the team as well. Problems or bugs in the applications are often the result of the troubles in the network, configurations or backend data. It is, therefore, necessary for the particular team to put focus on improving the quality of the overall environment instead of trying to detect the causes behind the respective problems.

Allocation of Resources and Timings

Allocation of time turns out to be a crucial point when it comes to developing, testing and fixing the iterations. Ideally, the test automation process should be started along with the development to avoid lags while also helping the team get more productive. A successful project accomplishment is one in which there are no last minute rushes and enough time is left for the explanatory test part.

TestComplete in Agile Testing

TestComplete in Agile testing is helpful because it is quite developer and tester- friendly. Enterprises go for this procedure as, it reduces the risk of specialization or what is better referred to as single- role maintainability of the test suite.

Summing it up, here is a list of few more tips that can be of use for the developers.

• It is always desirable to execute tests on a continuous basis
• The suites should not run for more than 1 hour. This is primarily because the one hour suites will be free from redundant flows. Alongside, they wont have more than 5% automation defects, which can further be reduced to zilch.
• Opposed to the commonly held idea, tests fail when there is a real defect and not because of a failure in automation.

You can hire testers from web application testing companies from India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide independent software testing services. If you would like to hire certified automation testers, please reach out to us at Mindfire Solutions.

Why should you consider 8 Types of Testing?

Software testing methodologies are in fact different approaches to testing, including procedures like unit testing, system testing and much more. So far as the methods of software evaluation are concerned, there is no formally recognized body present, and there is hardly any uniform set of definitions. However, there are certain common categories of testing. Before we learn about them, it is good to take a look at the five elements that are essential for software testing.

The five necessary things for software evaluation

• Test strategy: This is important for guiding you on the categories of evaluation that should be conducted, the sequence for performing as well as executing them, along with the optimal effort that needs to be put into every evaluation for deriving maximum effectiveness. An ideal strategy is usually based on the major requirements or information regarding what is significant to the clients.
• Evaluation plan: It involves the testing tasks, dealing with who will be conducting which tasks, along with the starting and ending time as well as the effort required. The plan provides a comprehensive list of the evaluation requisites, including the preparation done during each testing phase.
• Test cases: These are designed depending upon the strategy which confirms the amount of each evaluation that should be done. The development of the cases is based on the prioritized requirements along with the software's acceptance criteria. The quality and risk assessment parameters are also kept in mind.
• Test data: Along with the steps for test case execution, you are also required to systematically arrive at the test data to be used. This might often incorporate sets of product orders, addresses or names, or any other information the system leverages. Development of valuation data is usually carried out along with development of test case.
• Test Environment: The evaluation process definitely calls for the right place and the right equipment. Evaluation environments might be scaled down editions of the real scenario, but every part is required to be present so that the system can run efficiently.

Kinds of software testing to be considered

Considering the five essentials of software testing, let us now take a look at the different kinds of evaluation that can be taken into account. Broadly the process can be divided into two categories: Manual Testing and Automation Testing.

Manual testing involves evaluating the software without any kind of automated tool or script. The tester assumes the role of the end-user and evaluates the software for identification of any unanticipated bug or behavior. On the other hand, in automation testing, the evaluator composes script and makes use of another software to test the software in question. This procedure is often utilized to re-run the evaluation scenarios that were done manually, repeatedly as well as quickly.

Apart from these broad types, the process of software evaluation may also be categorized into the following major types:

• Black Box Testing: These evaluation procedures are based on functionality as well as requirements and not on the knowledge of coding or internal design.
• White Box Testing: This depends on the knowledge of internal logic pertaining to an application's code. The evaluations revolve around coverage of code statements, conditions, paths as well as branches.
• Unit Testing: This is in fact 'micro' scale of evaluation involving particular code modules or functions. The programmer and not the tester usually does this, as it calls for extensive knowledge regarding the internal program, code and design.
• Functional Testing: This category revolves around functional essentials of an application, and should be carried out by certified software testers.
• Integration Testing: Herein the combined components of an application are evaluated to determine whether they are functioning in unison appropriately. The components may be individual applications, code modules, server and client applications across a network, and so on.
• System Testing: Based on the requirement specifications as a whole, this procedure takes into account all of a system's combined components.
• Load Testing: This involves evaluating an application by subjecting it to heavy load, for instance, checking a website against load ranges for finding out under what condition the response time of the system fails or degrades.
• Usability Testing: Carried out to determine the 'user-friendliness', this subjective procedure depends on the client or end-user.

All these categories have one common aim- to ensure that the software runs effectively and renders the desired output. When all the five testing essentials are in place, the different evaluation types can be leveraged appropriately leading to organizational success.

We provide independent software testing services. If you would like to hire software test professionals from us or would just like to speak to one of our expert software testers, please reach out to us at Mindfire Solutions.