Flaky tests are automated software tests that sometimes pass and sometimes fail without an obvious reason. Often these tests will work well for a while, then occasionally start to fail. If the test passes on a second or third try without any obvious reason for the failures, the tester typically chalks it up to a glitch in the system and ignores the failed test result.

Manually testing an application is time-consuming, costly, and difficult to scale as your application grows: as you add more features to your application, you have to add more functional tests. And getting those additional tests done usually means adding headcount. Automated functional testing can speed up the testing process, provide more consistent results, and give one person the ability to manage the testing workload of five or more manual testers.

If you're looking to scale up your manual software testing without hiring a whole team of in-house testers, there are several outsourced software testing services that use crowd testers to provide affordable results. Many of these providers look similar on the surface—most offer exploratory testing, some version of scripted testing, and claim to integrate into your team's workflow.

In software development, there’s almost nothing more stressful than a hotfix—when a customer reports a bug that’s so severe everyone stops what they’re doing (no matter what time of day) to fix the bug. Hotfixes interrupt workflows and seem to always happen at the worst times. Often, a series of hotfixes will drive software teams to ask themselves: why isn’t our QA team catching these, and how can we improve QA?

For teams following agile software development practices, regression testing is a must. Agile teams constantly make changes to live software that can introduce regressions (or, code changes that break the functionality of part of an app). Regression testing can keep teams from shipping critical bugs to production by confirming the most important parts of an app are still working every time new code is pushed.