Whether you’re formulating your startup’s first QA strategy or you’ve realized your existing strategy is undermining your otherwise-agile methodologies, this post is for you. In this piece, we focus on the practical frameworks and practices that’ll help you lay a strong foundation for quality assurance in your org. Among other things, you’ll learn: Before we get into it: any strategy needs support to succeed.

If you’ve got an agile team interested in shipping fast without breaking things, this post is for you. In this piece, I’m going to explain how we at Rainforest QA approach automated testing in a continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, with a focus on end-to-end (e2e) functional testing. The aim of our testing and other DevOps methodologies is to maintain a healthy balance between speed and product quality.

Manual software testing services can help QA testing teams ramp up test coverage without adding headcount. Most of these services give you access to hundreds of testers across the world for an hourly, monthly, or annual fee. But there are key differences in the way the services handle testing, and those differences can affect how much time these services actually end up saving (or costing) you.

Regression testing—when done well—gives software teams the confidence that their entire application works properly after a code change. But doing regression testing manually is time-consuming, costly, and difficult to scale. As their applications grow in complexity, many teams end up having to throw more and more resources into regression testing—hiring more QA specialists and waiting longer for them to complete testing with each release cycle.

QA testing tools include everything from performance testing tools to workflow management tools. If you’re just getting started with software quality assurance, it can be difficult to know what tools you need (and how to tell them apart). Functional testing is the foundation of most software quality assurance efforts. That’s why we think the right automated functional testing tool is the most important part of your QA toolbox.

It happens at almost every early-stage startup: a major bug escapes into prod (or into an investor demo). For teams without meaningful quality controls in place, the common reactions are dismay, embarrassment, and the instinct to "hire someone who can own quality." In these cases, “quality” generally means a lack of bugs. While the logic seems sound – there’s a quality issue, so we should hire an expert to handle quality – this instinct is ultimately misguided.

Manually testing a website can be as simple as opening a web page or application in a staging environment, manually clicking through a list of test cases, and marking whether they passed or failed on a spreadsheet. And in fact, that's where most software teams start when they first invest in QA.

Continuous testing is the practice of testing software as frequently as possible (e.g., multiple times per day) and as early as possible in the development lifecycle. With more frequent updates and faster bug fixes, your product can be more responsive to market changes and the needs of customers.