One day suddenly the whole world locked down to prevent the pandemic from being spread uncontrollably. When machines and factories were all stopped – your social media, mobile applications, and all the digital world was still operating at the same pace as before. Even if you did not notice, millions of developers and testers worked from their homes to keep you online and help you share your thoughts, purchase essential supplies and view live news.

Modern-day applications aim to cover a wide range of users’ needs in a flexible and scalable manner. The software development landscape is moving at a fast pace, and the competition is so fierce that a business simply can’t afford to offer a low-quality product. Thorough testing of both functional and non-functional aspects of a software application has become an essential step in the software development process. It ensures that users get the best version of your product.

COVID-19 has changed our lives in so many ways. There is not a single aspect of our life that is untouched by it. The way organizations operate their work has also changed drastically. Before 2020 no one would have guessed that work from home will become such an internationally accepted phenomenon. However, working from home has been a new experience for most of us, and there are times that we find ourselves struggling too.

​ One of the common challenges when doing performance testing is the difficulty of correlating the metrics of your application with your testing results. Having available QA, infrastructure, and application metrics together allows engineering teams to better understand the behavior of their systems during the testing, helping to detect and prevent potential issues in their applications.

If you want your QA to go above and beyond basic expectations, structured exploratory testing is the secret weapon to elite functionality and good UX. When testing web and mobile apps, executing functional, regression-based scripted test cases is the minimum standard for ensuring that your software performs as expected. However, scripted functional testing can only validate if the system works as intended and can easily miss edge cases you wouldn’t even think to test.

Recently we had a chance to work with several software testing teams to help them get started with their test automation endeavors. The teams consist of mostly manual testers, and some who had experience with test automation before, but none of them were familiar with programming like developers. The applications are mostly web based, with companion mobile apps.