There’s no successful dev cycle without ensuring functionality, and QA has been integral to functional testing since the dawn of software. Traditionally, functional testing meant human testers running smoke and regression tests, but wielding automated functional testing can help teams keep up with the competition and bring QA into a modern CI/CD pipeline.

Like many tech endeavors, QA has undergone radical evolution over the past decade, and to keep up with the competition, dev teams are looking toward the future of QA. Now, perhaps more than ever, consumers hold a critically high bar for their web and mobile apps. This means, of course, continued investment in efficient, high-quality testing to stay competitive. But what about the A word?

Automation is critical for a holistic software testing strategy in today’s DevOps cycle. Efficient automated QA systems run by talented engineers can shorten development times, improve time to release, lower costs, and drive scale. It’s worth noting that nearly a quarter of companies that initiated automated software testing showed an ROI within the first six months. Sounds perfect, right?

If you are reading this, you have likely already identified a high-level need to scale or improve your current approach to testing without the mass hiring of in-house testers, or shifting left to make devs fully responsible for QA. Partnering with a software testing company is a great start, but what if a vendor offers multiple models? How can you define which software testing staffing model is right for you?

Releasing software without extensive quality assurance testing is asking for trouble. Poorly-designed software, bugs, or miserable UX dooms even the best projects – and with today’s hyper-intensive and rapid development cycles, things are sure to slip through the cracks. You can’t skimp on software testing, but planning your 2023 QA budget may feel tighter than normal amidst fears of a recession, inflation, and the global economy.

After working in UX for many years across several companies, I can confidently say this: usability testing is always a fragile issue. Companies expect their product to be exceptional and deliver value to their customers but believe that user experience testing is a time/cost sink. I’ve heard the claim (countless times) that user experience testing limits and prevents dev teams from pushing new products and features.

Developing high-quality apps involves pressure to make tradeoffs on speed, quality, and features to meet deadlines for release. This tension between speed and quality comes to a head with QA: you need a functional product but can’t afford weeks of turnaround time. You can’t skip QA: the true cost of software bugs – the direct cost of mitigating the defects and the indirect cost of decreased consumer trust – is extraordinary.

You’ve heard from us about fused testing before, and get ready to hear more. Fused testing is a methodology that goes beyond just executing manual and automated testing frameworks. (Though it does do that exceptionally well.) Fused testing is also a big push toward continuous integration (CI). Yes, that CI/CD pipeline.

In the first blog of this series, I used the metaphor of a bridge connecting two towns to illustrate the importance of establishing purposeful connections between your shift left and shift right testing initiatives. Modern product organizations that fail to engineer a bridge to link the two “towns” (shift left and shift right) will, at a minimum, suboptimally utilize precious human and machine testing resources.