Research has shown that 35% of companies find manual software testing to be the most time-consuming part of the software development life cycle. Because manual testing is so time consuming, test automation has been growing as a solid way to improve ROI. From reduced tester fatigue and greater productivity to a better product and faster time to market – building a robust test automation framework can add numerous benefits to your team.

Exploratory testing is a dynamic and creative approach to software testing that emphasizes your freedom and responsibility to adapt to changing testing conditions. However, without a clear direction or purpose, getting lost in testing without achieving meaningful results can be easy. This is where test charters come in. In this article, we will explore what test charters are and how to use them to optimize your exploratory testing process.

Hardware and software systems often involve numerous parameters that influence a system’s output(s). Those parameters can represent input, environment, or usage patterns and can have a finite or infinite number of options/values. For instance, on a booking flights website, the Flying From, Flying to, Class, (number of) Adults, and (number of) Children input parameters can easily provide hundreds of different combinations for creating tests.

Didn’t you have the chance to listen to our podcast? Don’t worry. With this article series, you can read the highlights of each episode. In this episode, Maaret Pyhäjärvi is our QA therapist and helps us diagnose and prescribe the symptoms of exploratory testing. Maaret has several significant awards in the testing space. She has delivered hundreds of talks and is a frequent keynote speaker. She lives testing from the inside out and has contributed to the industry for years.

Technology enhancements have triggered the evolution of web applications as the needs and demands of users have also evolved. These applications are adapting to the screen, changing the way they interact with the user and are more demanding in terms of security, accessibility, stability and resilience. The user has now increased its technological awareness as a result of his exposure.

Caris Life Sciences® (Caris) is a leader in precision medicine. Their molecular profiling tests help Oncologists diagnose and treat their cancer patients. Caris is also deep in clinical research, supporting the development of tomorrow's treatments. With more than 1,300 employees, Caris has offices in the United States, Japan and Switzerland and provides services throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia and other international markets.

Traditionally, manual test management and automated testing generate independent quality reporting data that has to be either manually integrated in spreadsheets or programmatically via scripts and reporting tools. This process takes valuable QA time away from actual testing and can also create inconsistency and inaccuracy when reporting on release readiness due to both the lag time in combining data from both sources and general human error.

In Part 1 of this series about Test Case Design, you learned that by using the Test Case Designer tool in Xray Enterprise, you take a model-first approach to designing more thorough and efficient tests. But how does the tool generate optimized scenarios once we define those models? And what do we mean by “optimized”?

Normally, testers write scripts on their own, which can be time-consuming, difficult to ensure 100% coverage, and hard to communicate precise requirements coverage achieved to critical stakeholders and clients. Inside Xray Enterprise, the new test case design tool, Test Case Designer (TCD), takes a model-based approach to designing more powerful tests. The tool’s algorithm uses pairwise/combinatorial methods to generate optimized tests based on the parameter models.

The days of waterfall and siloed teams are gone. QA now works alongside development to release products faster and find bugs sooner. Agile transformations changed how companies work, bringing development and testing together and prioritizing quality. However, the current market and consumers demand higher levels of quality and faster releases. Companies can’t afford bugs, vulnerabilities, or critical issues. Quality is no longer a vision - it’s a necessity.