Software testing is the process of finding bugs or discrepancies in a software. It is a process put in place to check that an application, set to be released in the market for users, has a minimum number of errors. Even though the job of a software tester is to catch errors committed by developers, software testers themselves are not immune to errors. As a beginner in software testing, you would make your own mistakes and learn from them to shape your career path.

Remote work has been steadily gaining popularity for some years now. According to an article published by smallbizgenius, in 2019, the number of people who work from home has increased by 140% since 2005. Now, most of the population is working from home. For most of the companies that had not adapted work from home before, this time has been an eye-opener. Many companies including the big ones like Twitter, Barclays, Mondelez are allowing employees to continue work from home indefinitely.

To quote the study, “For every USD 14 million delivery by the software development and QA team, a hidden USD 3 million was being spent on data management.

Imagine a scenario where your customers see a nasty bug in your application the day a major release was rolled out. You had been raving about the new update but the bug now blocks the main workflow. The update did not add up to your company’s goodwill as it should have. Regression Testing is put in place just to avoid such situations.

Time suddenly took a U-turn and did when we least expected it. While just some time ago, millions of people were travelling across the globe, now we are forced to stay at home for our good. If expert opinion and news analysis are to be believed, remote work is expected to become the new norm at least in the near future. We need to equip ourselves to better adapt to the situation in the best way possible.

We are certainly in a faster-paced world. As we move forward, organizations need to get out of their silos and follow a more collaborative and efficient process to achieve excellence. Organizations that adopt DevOps are able to evolve and improve software products much faster when compared to those that use traditional software development processes. DevOps is a bridge between development and operations in an organization and aims to improve productivity as a whole.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – a famous quote by Hellen Keller is very much valid even in current times, especially in the context of teamwork. The relationship between any two people is considered good when communication between them is healthy. And on the same lines, a team is able to work ‘together’ better when their communication is strong.

How can we bridge the gap between business and development? How do we make sure that features being developed are according to the business requirements from the beginning? The answer is BDD, a framework that allows the business requirements to be converted into test cases that are reviewable by business and users when needed. Let us start with understanding what is Behavior Driven Development and the purpose it serves in detail below.

Though manual testing will always have its place, test automation is a necessary part of an organization’s testing process as it can help the business achieve larger business goals like high-quality products with less cost and reduced investment on resources. Also, there are other benefits such as quick test results, shortened release cycles among many others.

Making a decision to start automation is easy but choosing an appropriate tool for automation is not. There are teams that are spending a lot on hiring new manual testing resources but find it hard to invest in automation. The reasons could be many.