About QA Testing Tools

Quality assurance testing involves the entire software development process: monitoring and improving the process, making sure that any agreed-upon standards and procedures are followed, and ensuring that problems are found and dealt with. It’s clearly oriented toward preventing problems rather than having to solve them after they occur.

Organizations vary considerably in how they assign responsibility for quality assurance and testing. Sometimes QA and testing the combined responsibility of one group or individual within the company. Also common are project teams that include a mix of testers and developers who work closely together, with overall QA processes monitored by project managers. The QA testing tools that you choose will depend on what best fits an organization’s size and business structure.

What QA Testing Tools Are Best for You?

If you’ve determined that it’s appropriate to investigate the next steps to bring QA testing tools to your organization, here are some key considerations to keep in mind:

• A lot depends on the size of the organization and the risks involved. For large organizations with high-risk projects, serious management buy-in is required and a formalized QA/test process is necessary before choosing QA testing tools.
• Where the risk is lower, management and organizational buy-in and QA/test implementation may be a slower, step-at-a-time process. QA processes should be balanced with productivity so as to keep bureaucracy from getting out of hand.
• For small groups or projects, a more ad-hoc process may be appropriate, depending on the type of customers and projects. A lot will depend on team leads or managers, feedback to developers, and ensuring adequate communications among customers, managers, developers, and testers.
• The most value for effort will often be in (a) requirements management processes, with a goal of clear, complete, testable requirement specifications embodied in requirements or design documentation, or in ‘agile’-type environments extensive continuous coordination with end-users, (b) design inspections and code inspections, and (c) post-mortems/retrospectives.

Common Features of QA Testing Tools

• The newest on-demand QA testing tools deliver an expanded test platform, eliminating up-front license fees and protracted implementation periods of traditional QA and proprietary test solutions. On-Demand QA testing tools leverage open source frameworks and are delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, enabling Web development operations of all sizes to benefit from them.
• QA testing tools address the challenges posed by today’s Web applications, which increasingly depend on aggregating third-party functionality at the point of delivery – the browser. The implementation of new client-side delivery tools and the proliferation of alternative browsers have given rise to a host of variables – including operating system, geography and connection speed – that can affect the performance of an application.
• The proliferation of browser and operating system platforms, accompanied by the explosion in Web-based applications, is driving the need for enhanced quality assurance tools. Web application developers need the tools to perform complex QA tasks in parallel across multiple browser/OS platforms and ensure a high level of application performance before release.

QA Testing Tools

• Industry vendors now deliver QA testing tools that let users load-test applications under real-world peak loads using real devices connected to the Internet.
• QA testing tools can now be performed that realistically emulate the profile and load characteristics of a customer’s actual production user base.
• Websites can now be tested under a production load in an authentic environment prior to releasing it to customers. This can be done with a single click. This and the other new On-Demand QA testing tools reflect the fact that a quality Web experience starts long before applications are deployed.
• Solutions are available that provide cross-browser functional QA testing of applications. Users can load scripts of business transactions recorded using the leading open source Web-testing frameworks. Once loaded into the system, these scripts can be played back manually or on a scheduled basis against the desired combination of browsers and operating systems.
• In addition to providing a pass/fail determination of the Web application’s functionality, a product can capture screen shots and movies of each test. This unique capability enables developers to see precisely how an end-user would experience the application, which is critical for the latest generation of Web 2.0 type applications.