Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Across nearly every industry, the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a period of immediate digital disruption. With lives at risk, the healthcare industry quickly innovated to provide fitness, wellness, and medical care on familiar devices. Now, two years after the pandemic’s start, medical apps face compounding pressures to match the speed and quality of consumer demands.

So your AWS bill is on fire and suddenly your all-hands takes up multiple screens on Zoom. Users are doubling. Your investors are thrilled to see your startup hitting its stride. But your rapid growth has led to a couple of scary-looking bugs in production. Users in new locations and on previously unseen devices are popping up in your activity log. Your unit tests aren’t cutting it anymore, and an untimely bug puts your growing user base at risk.

Nearly two years into the mass adoption of virtual experiences, many industries are just starting to get a solid footing on fitting virtual events into the flow of their businesses. Leveraging virtual events requires a virtual event planning checklist and QA to ensure attendees can log-in, view, participate, and have outstanding experiences. Maybe you’ve run hundreds of online events, webinars, and conferences and feel confident in your quality.

Two paradigms dominate the modern software testing landscape, shift left and shift right. These are fueled primarily by the need to accelerate software delivery to keep pace with a more dynamic and demanding digital engagement landscape. Shift left moves testing workloads earlier in the SDLC, leveraging test automation and practices like behavior-driven development (BDD) to foster developer accountability and more comprehensive testing.

Last week members of our service, network and sales teams gathered in Copenhagen to take in software testing best practices at the 2022 EuroSTAR software testing conference. On the ground, in our discussions, and during sessions we picked up on three key themes important to the future of our industry —

If your typical user story looks like: “As a new user, I want to create an account to have an account,” then you might have a problem. As a recent viral Twitter thread from user evangelist and UX pro Laura Klein pointed out a big issue in the QA community: how to write a user story. Product owners are trying to create and execute as many user stories as possible to define requirements and establish acceptance criteria.

While a lot of attention is being paid to cost controls in the context of current market trends, the pressure to reduce software testing costs is not something that changes with economic tides. The reality is that even in a bull market, development leaders — pushed by financial expectations and the costly nature of development — are not only being asked to deliver high-quality releases faster than ever, they’re being asked to tighten budgets.

If you feel that internal resources are running low relative to demand, you’re not alone. At the 2022 Women of Silicon Valley conference, speakers touched on the difficulty of acquiring and retaining resources, preparing teams for change, and optimizing software testing on a small budget. At the most basic level, the requirements of the software dev process, from designing, coding, and testing, are enormous.

Software dev and QA have a historically complicated relationship. Engineering teams are sprinting to keep up with the astronomical demand for high-quality software and meet target engineering KPIs. But QA delays releases and adds unexpected debugging assignments to already-busy sprint boards. In the words of one engineer from GitLab’s 2021 developer survey, “testing slows down everything.”