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Automated Smoke Testing: Everything You Need to Know

In software testing, smoke tests are a small set of end-to-end tests that make sure the most essential functions of an application or website work properly. Many software teams run a smoke testing suite of 10 to 15 tests as a preliminary step before running an entire regression suite (which could have anywhere from 50 to 500+ tests) to make sure the app is stable enough to merit further testing.

A Quick Start Guide to User Interface Testing

User interface testing (sometimes called graphical user interface testing) involves testing software applications according to what the end user will see on their screen and how they’ll interact with it. For example, can you type in text boxes or click the checkboxes? Are fonts, headers, and other visual elements correct? UI testing can be done manually or with a test automation tool.

A Detailed Comparison of UI Testing Tools and What to Look For

The goal of user interface (UI) testing is to verify that: However, most software testing tools either test the appearance of the application or the functionality—few tools do both well. To test functionality, most automated software testing tools primarily interact with the underlying code of an application, while assuming that the visual layer (what the user sees) is rendering properly.

A Comparison of the Best Automated Testing Tools for Beginners

Automating your software tests can speed up testing and provide more reliable test results. For most software teams, automation is necessary to achieve adequate test coverage. If you’re just getting started with automated software testing, you may be overwhelmed by all the options and have a hard time figuring out which tools are right for your team.

Visual Regression Testing: 5 Best Tools to Catch Visual Bugs

Automated visual regression testing tools check for style issues and problems with the visual layer of an app or website. The benefit of these tools is that they can catch issues on the visual layer (the user interface of the website or app, which customers see) that may get missed by test scripts that only interact with the underlying code (the DOM).

A Practical Guide to Reducing the Burden of Flaky Tests

Flaky tests are automated software tests that sometimes pass and sometimes fail without an obvious reason. Often these tests will work well for a while, then occasionally start to fail. If the test passes on a second or third try without any obvious reason for the failures, the tester typically chalks it up to a glitch in the system and ignores the failed test result.

Automated Functional Testing 101: How & When to Start

Manually testing an application is time-consuming, costly, and difficult to scale as your application grows: as you add more features to your application, you have to add more functional tests. And getting those additional tests done usually means adding headcount. Automated functional testing can speed up the testing process, provide more consistent results, and give one person the ability to manage the testing workload of five or more manual testers.

Applause vs Rainforest QA vs Testlio vs Test IO: Crowdtesting Guide

If you're looking to scale up your manual software testing without hiring a whole team of in-house testers, there are several outsourced software testing services that use crowd testers to provide affordable results. Many of these providers look similar on the surface—most offer exploratory testing, some version of scripted testing, and claim to integrate into your team's workflow.

You Only Need These 5 QA Metrics to Improve Software Testing

In software development, there’s almost nothing more stressful than a hotfix—when a customer reports a bug that’s so severe everyone stops what they’re doing (no matter what time of day) to fix the bug. Hotfixes interrupt workflows and seem to always happen at the worst times. Often, a series of hotfixes will drive software teams to ask themselves: why isn’t our QA team catching these, and how can we improve QA?