Successful usability testing takes time and expertise to plan and execute. Moderated usability testing involves a process of user research, participant recruitment, testing user flows, and analyzing data. The end results will uncover prioritized problem areas that, when addressed, will provide new ways to satisfy and retain your users. Different UX methods are dynamically used depending on the team’s goals, product, and audience.

With today’s accelerated development schedules, your team will likely rely on high-quality testers to help create great user experiences and improve software testing outcomes. Many companies have turned to on-demand freelance testers to ramp up in-house teams for better, more thorough QA coverage. Here’s the catch; this strategy only works if the testers you employ have the right skills for the job.

With today’s accelerated pace of delivery, you need to manage dev speed while keeping high-quality ships. This requires a focus on both quality assurance and development into quality engineering. These two goals can often be at odds without a robust system for process and testing.

At a macro level, software testing is an activity that seeks to find bugs or problems in software products. An essential subset of software testing is functional software testing, defined as a type of black-box testing method that focuses on the functionality of a software product. It’s a technique for ensuring that an application meets its requirements and specifications by executing test cases from the user’s perspective.

There’s no successful dev cycle without ensuring functionality, and QA has been integral to functional testing since the dawn of software. Traditionally, functional testing meant human testers running smoke and regression tests, but wielding automated functional testing can help teams keep up with the competition and bring QA into a modern CI/CD pipeline.