Modern-day applications aim to cover a wide range of users’ needs in a flexible and scalable manner. The software development landscape is moving at a fast pace, and the competition is so fierce that a business simply can’t afford to offer a low-quality product. Thorough testing of both functional and non-functional aspects of a software application has become an essential step in the software development process. It ensures that users get the best version of your product.

COVID-19 has changed our lives in so many ways. There is not a single aspect of our life that is untouched by it. The way organizations operate their work has also changed drastically. Before 2020 no one would have guessed that work from home will become such an internationally accepted phenomenon. However, working from home has been a new experience for most of us, and there are times that we find ourselves struggling too.

​ One of the common challenges when doing performance testing is the difficulty of correlating the metrics of your application with your testing results. Having available QA, infrastructure, and application metrics together allows engineering teams to better understand the behavior of their systems during the testing, helping to detect and prevent potential issues in their applications.

Your mileage may vary on Ryan Gosling films. I happen to be a fan, and I always chuckle during the climactic scene in The Notebook. Drenched in rain, Gosling says to Rachel McAdams’ character, “It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over.” He of course is talking about their relationship, but I could easily draw a parallel here with testing. While in the past it may have seemed that a tester’s job was done once code was pushed into production, that is no longer the case.

Recently we had a chance to work with several software testing teams to help them get started with their test automation endeavors. The teams consist of mostly manual testers, and some who had experience with test automation before, but none of them were familiar with programming like developers. The applications are mostly web based, with companion mobile apps.

If you want your QA to go above and beyond basic expectations, structured exploratory testing is the secret weapon to elite functionality and good UX. When testing web and mobile apps, executing functional, regression-based scripted test cases is the minimum standard for ensuring that your software performs as expected. However, scripted functional testing can only validate if the system works as intended and can easily miss edge cases you wouldn’t even think to test.