Nowadays, there are several options for businesses, including mobile-friendly websites, native or hybrid apps that can be downloaded from an app store or a web app that renders HTML web pages, APIs that can be used to develop multiple user interfaces, or all of these options at once. It is critical that the software application performs as expected on any platform it is running on, whether that platform is a mobile platform, a desktop computer, or the internet.
Any business’s ultimate goals determine the type of application that needs to be developed. More often than not, businesses need an application for both mobile and web, with each coming with its unique set of challenges. Having a great user experience across all of a customer’s devices is crucial to a company’s success. Within that context, it’s hard to miss the fact that it’s not an easy task to create software and test it across a wide range of platforms and browsers.
As companies adopt multi-faceted DevOps approaches, they are increasingly likely to see software quality as a shared responsibility among many diverse teams at various stages of the development process. Simultaneously, there are also new tools, tests, and processes to keep track of when there are more teams involved. Thus, it’s natural that it becomes far more difficult for companies to maintain traceability and release software with confidence while also conducting strategic testing to deliver better software more quickly. Additionally, we now have smart and connected devices, so development and testing bring in newer challanges
Time-consuming manual testing across many user interfaces requires a lot of effort. Realistically, your Agile and DevOps strategy doesn’t allow you to manually test the working of each of these, as release cycles are becoming shorter and so is the tolerance to defects and non-compliances. In such instances, the best strategy is to use test automation and continuous testing through manual and automation approaches. As a result, DevOps/Continuous Delivery criteria can be met to a large extent using solutions for automated builds/deployments and testing.
The best way to parallel development is to have a unified Continuous Testing platform that can automate every type of application on every platform, rather than various automation testing solutions that can only automate one type of application.
Next, let’s further talk about why having a unified testing framework can truly make a difference for the success of your testing goals.
Benefits of Unified Testing Framework
Different applications shouldn’t need different skills for automation with the different or same testing tools. Otherwise, you might need more than one person with different skills to validate each function. This causes the testing process to take longer and the budget for automation to go up due to the maintenance of approaches, scripts, and frameworks, if any. In a nutshell, this slows down the return on investment
Most of the time, you need to interact with different types of applications/platforms to finish an end-to-end business use case. For example, you might apply for a loan in a mobile app and then check the details of the loan application from a web portal. Thus, it’s important that all the tests and requirements for different applications and test types leverage a unified testing framework so they are unified, automated, and continuous and have all stakeholders easily access them at any time. A unified testing framework or approach, along with a built-in test management system, can let tests be updated continuously and help the stakeholders stay up to date on the requirements.
Every business has a unique set of challenges, so having a unified testing framework provides different benefits, mainly the ability to make better decisions faster by having a 360 degree view of what your business needs, testing-wise. Other key benefits of equipping your IT and Quality Assurance teams with a unified testing framework include:
- Automated, manual, and exploratory testing
- Seamless traceability to requirements and defects
- Easy, native integrations with tools across the Software Development Lifecycle
- Real-time analytics connected to the rest of your business
By putting in place a business-oriented and optimized testing approach, or what some refer to as business-driven testing, companies can greatly reduce cost of testing and implement testing automation successfully. To achieve this, companies should redesign their testing strategy for centralized, reusable test cases and embed automated testing within CI/CD.
Now, it’s important to note that automation is not the fix-all in every situation or the only route to accelerate testing and ensure quality. Instead, companies should seek the consulting of testing experts to determine what approach works best for their unique situation, with scalability and standardization as context.
Conclusion
IT teams and Quality Assurance teams depend on more than just test automation. They also need a tight feedback loop and the right set of tools to deliver high-quality software. There needs to be a unified testing framework for both manual and automated testing that can be used for continuous testing, supports multiple types of applications, and can run on different browsers, operating systems, At IT Convergence, we provide a full spectrum of Digital Testing Services to automate beyond classic automated testing. From Classical testing, Non-Functional testing, ERP testing, Extreme test automation, Framework Development, Transformational Services, to name a few, there’s a solution ready for you to help achieve ROI and business value faster than with traditional testing techniques.
Our focus on Testing Automation drives the shift-left value chain across and beyond the software development life cycle and delivers quality at the speed of agile. The holistic approach to quality baked into requirements, development & operations serves to reduce the business risk exposure, increase user experience and efficiency gains.
We deliver custom solutions built to address unique customer needs with a lower cost of quality and high yield assembly-based testing frameworks.