Regression testing—when done well—gives software teams the confidence that their entire application works properly after a code change. But doing regression testing manually is time-consuming, costly, and difficult to scale. As their applications grow in complexity, many teams end up having to throw more and more resources into regression testing—hiring more QA specialists and waiting longer for them to complete testing with each release cycle.

It happens at almost every early-stage startup: a major bug escapes into prod (or into an investor demo). For teams without meaningful quality controls in place, the common reactions are dismay, embarrassment, and the instinct to "hire someone who can own quality." In these cases, “quality” generally means a lack of bugs. While the logic seems sound – there’s a quality issue, so we should hire an expert to handle quality – this instinct is ultimately misguided.

Manually testing a website can be as simple as opening a web page or application in a staging environment, manually clicking through a list of test cases, and marking whether they passed or failed on a spreadsheet. And in fact, that's where most software teams start when they first invest in QA.

Continuous testing is the practice of testing software as frequently as possible (e.g., multiple times per day) and as early as possible in the development lifecycle. With more frequent updates and faster bug fixes, your product can be more responsive to market changes and the needs of customers.

There are dozens of software testing tools available in 2022 — and they’re not as similar as they may seem on the surface. To choose the right tool for your team, you need to carefully consider the technical skillset of your team and the complexity of the application you’re testing. In this article, we discuss four questions to consider in order to understand the differences between tools.

Automated software testing tools are used to automate interactions with software so tests can be run without a human having to perform each action. This lets one person run multiple tests at once and eliminates most of the human error associated with manual testing. Although there are many types of software testing, functional testing is the most common and the one most teams start with. That’s why we’ll be focusing on functional testing in this article.

In software testing, regression tests are a series of tests run right before releasing a new feature or update to make sure the critical functionalities of your software are still working. Regression testing is done to make sure a new build didn’t introduce bugs into other, existing features of your software.

Smoke testing is the practice of running a small set of tests to ensure the basic functionalities of an application or website are working before moving on to other, more comprehensive types of software testing. For smoke testing to be the most effective, it needs to be completed very quickly so that developers can get fast feedback about the stability of the new build.

Testim is an automated software testing tool that was developed with the goal of making test writing and maintenance easier by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI). Many teams choose Testim for automated software testing for two reasons.

If you use a framework like Electron to develop a desktop version of your web application, you may have run into a common problem when testing your application: So while you can test most of the critical functions of your app in the web version, there are some critical test cases for the desktop version that you simply can’t automate (such as setting up desktop notifications or verifying the app can be downloaded and installed).