October 2015 - Testbytes Software

Talks about the use of cloud infrastructure for software testing have been in the limelight for some time now. It is particularly useful in high-stake situations where a company is bound by time and cost constraints. Along with the advantage of unlimited storage space, its quick availability and flexibility has fueled global acceptance.

The software industry has changed forever with the introduction of virtualization, which paved way for cloud computing. Hence it is necessary for one to follow the below mentioned steps to ensure effective progress in cloud testing.

Understand Cloud Technology: As it is with any business venture, one must first make sense of what is necessary to improve his/her outcomes. Cloud testing can be a completely alien environment even for experienced testers. Thus find time to understand how and where cloud testing can help you in the long run. Understand the benefits of moving a particular testing project into cloud. Remember, cloud testing isn’t the final word when it comes to finding a solution for your testing problems. It is important to conduct unit, functional and integration testing throughout the development cycle.
Have Your Own Testing Strategy: Having a well-defined strategy can be the difference between the success and downfall of your testing methods. Have a clear idea about what type of tests should be performed in cloud. You must also be aware about the risks associated with cloud testing.

Weigh the pros and cons of moving to a cloud-based testing.

Have a Planned Infrastructure: Moving to cloud testing environment will need careful planning to choose the right kind of testing tools, applications, hardware, software and even bandwidth. Planning should also be done on how long these tools will be in use. That can help with cost reduction and control.
Choose the Right Service Provider: Security, quality and reliability should be the most important qualities associated with your service provider. They must be able to provide a quick set-up or tear–down of test environment along with other services like physical infrastructure, testing tools and licenses through provisioning.

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Executing the Test: Here the application is tested according to a pre-defined test strategy. You should plan and look for optimal utilization of the test infrastructure in order to realize cost benefits.
Monitor and analyze test results: It is necessary to monitor test results in real-time to understand and solve issues concerning capacity or performance. You must even analyze cloud usage against chargeback costs to understand the financial performance of your cloud services.

To master the art of cloud testing for the enhancement of software testing, the following challenges must be overcome:

Security: The first and foremost challenge when it comes to cloud technology is security. It must deliver ample user privacy protection and should also meet the security standards on cloud. Hence, if you are to expand software testing into the realm of cloud technology, security testing should be your primary concern.
Cloud Compatibility: A great concern for companies when it comes to cloud technology is the performance of their applications, especially in private cloud. Sharing across many users can lead to delays and also cases of maintenance or outage may cause insufficiency of bandwidth.
Unsupportive: Sometime with cloud technology, it becomes difficult to emulate the customer environment. This is caused by the unsupportive nature of cloud towards certain configurations for servers, storage or networking that is vital for testing. Therefore make sure whether your application is built to provide the required results on cloud technology.
Challenge in Integration Testing: Integration testing is where the tester performs tests on the network, database, servers etc. But with cloud computing, the tester has no control over the underlying environment. This becomes even more challenging when there is interaction between components, with the tester having to anticipate the occurrence of crashes, network breakdown or servers.

Do you think there is more to mastering cloud computing? If yes, please share your thoughts with us in the comment section.

People consider Usability Testing to be a costly, complicated affair that consumes a lot of time. Well, that is not the case. Testing for applications, apps, and interfaces are actually quite simple if you go the right way. It will help you make numerous changes to ensure your users are happy with the end product. You can easily formulate a DIY Mobile App Testing process that is affordable, effective, simple, and fast at the same time.

Usability Performance Testing made Simple
Here are 8 ways by which you can make way for easy DIY Usability Testing:

Keep the situation informal

You can set up a testing area anywhere in your firm. Use a single email to list out the results of the process, use bullet points to point out the issues found, and keep it simple. You are testing a small number of people, so there is no need of collecting the statistics. Do not go for big reports with all kinds of details, both necessary and unnecessary ones.

Early Testing

It is a common mistake to wait until the whole development process is complete to start the testing process. Spending money on testing at the early stages is not considered as an option by many. This makes it too late to be able to fix the relevant issues. If you start testing early, you could find bugs and ensure they are fixed before you go deeper into the development process. These tests are quite short, but help you considerably in the long run.

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Test a Small Number of People

Do not test too many users at once. The ideal number of people to test an app is considered to be three. It is an optimum number which will help you find more problems than the resources you have to be able to fix the issues immediately. In order to get serious problems, you do not need too many users for testing.

Test Occasionally

Setting up a fixed date for testing every month is a good idea. This ensures that regular testing is done on whatever you are developing, even if much progress had been made or not. Bring in three people on a fixed date and let them test your application. This helps you schedule your tasks, make recruiting easy, and organize the whole process. Since you can already plan things ahead, there will be no interference to the development process due to testing. You can stick to milestones and need not wait for last moment feedback from the Software Tester.

Focus on the Most Important Issues

It is important to categorize the issues found after testing. You are bound to get a huge number of bugs or fixes required. This number may even overtake the number of resources you have to be able to fix them. As such, it is important to select the most important issues from the list and work on fixing them. Some of the issues may not even matter much as far as the functionality is concerned, and you can omit them for the next release.

Have Regular Conversation with your Users

The idea is to keep your users talking, and hear them as they think out loud. It often works like a therapy for the developers to work with the users. It gives them a deep insight about how users think, and their wavelength while using your application. This feedback is literally Software Performance Testing.

Involve Everyone in your Mobile App Testing Process

Limit the number of testers to just three. But, be open to suggestions and feedback from everyone in your organization. Have sessions to make your application open for discussions by all. This can help you get various ideas, which can be highly creative and useful. It is very powerful if a number of minds come together to discuss a particular case. Have informal discussions at the table, and pick up whatever you find useful. Utilize them in the best way possible.

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Stick to Tweaking

Problems should be fixed in the easiest way possible. Always stick to tweaking, and never go for redesigning. Make the simplest change you could do to solve the issue instead of trying your hand at maintaining perfection. Do only the least you could do. Redesigning consumes a lot of time and effort. In turn, tweaking is more cost effective and faster. Large changes take much longer, and could even break things elsewhere. Taking such risks is absolutely not worth the effort.

Mobile App Testing Services help you bring the best out of your App by picking out bugs and making it the best in all possible ways. The main idea is to make your end users happy, and through usability testing, you can know how exactly this can be done.

Month: October 2015

8 Ways to Make Usability Testing Simple