Overcoming QA Hurdles during Deployment

Understanding the gravity of Testing

With the onset of Agile and DevOps, the feature delivery time is decreasing while the technical complexity required to deliver a positive user experience and improve the quality of each release is increasing. So the importance of testing the code with agility is paramount, and this quote perfectly sums it up –

“Digital business is driving a faster pace of delivery to support the continuous delivery of incremental changes. Traditional testing cannot meet this pace nor the expanded view of quality required.” “DevOps and Cloud Speed Are Driving the End of QA as We Know It,” Thomas Murphy, Joachim Herschmann, Gartner, 13 August 2018.

The Daily Struggle: Developers vs Testers

“QA is always the bottleneck!” “There is no time to test!”

Are you familiar with these common misconceptions? Are your developers and testers always at loggerheads? Are these your everyday scenes?

This is because of the typical stereotype that testing delays application delivery or that the process is just not fast enough to help teams find and fix defects within timelines. 
A recent GitLabs survey that targeted developers and engineers found that testing is responsible for more delays than any other part of the development process.

Listed below are some of the top QA hurdles.

So, is QA really a hurdle to your deployment? Why is testing such a formidable bottleneck? This is what Webomates hopes to answer along with its unique capabilities to enforce Quality Assurance.

Attain QA Nirvana with Webomates

Before jumping into the Hurdle-Solution, let’s quickly look at what Quality Assurance is about and how we see it at Webomates.

Quality Assurance is “The maintenance of a desired level of quality in a service or product, especially by means of attention to every stage of the process of delivery or production.”

Drawing on the lessons learned and its vast experience, Webomates QA team becomes a part of the cross-functional DevOps Agile effort, and helps the whole team cohesively. Webomates is inundated with tools, techniques, and methodologies for achieving a higher level of software quality and helps you to deliver new features with no fear. 

Now let us look at the hurdles you could face from traditional QA teams and how Webomates helps you navigate through the hurdles/bottlenecks.

The Hurdle – “More test cases are needed to cover 100% of everything.
“The Solution – Ensure 100% test coverage with the right size of tests at the right time!

You added a new feature to your product? Test. 
You made changes to the previous feature? Test.
Does your end product work correctly after feature integration? Test again! 

The more features and improvements you add into your code, the more you need to test to ensure that your product works as expected. For each defect the developer fixes, you need tests to check that they don’t get back in newer releases. But would you use the same test cases at the same frequency for all these scenarios? You need different types of testing to make sure that changes to the code are working as expected. What usually takes others weeks to complete, Webomates goes one step further and provides you the results within hours. 

As per the scope of the build, Webomates has the agility to perform verification using CI/CD, Overnight or Full regression. It shortens the regression cycle from weeks to hours.

The Hurdle – “Developers have a hard time understanding the defect”
The Solution – Report the Bug in a Developer friendly way

Finding a bug is half the battle. Reporting it in a way it is understood by the developer is a whole another battle. If the developers don’t understand the defect report OR if they can’t replicate the defect, they can’t fix it.

Webomates strives to be the developers companion as it takes the Defect Triaging to the next level by ensuring it:

• Explains a bug to the developer and shows where it is by providing video artifacts, logs and API calls as required
• Helps the developer fix it with the minimal time cost

To help developers better visualize the defects, Webomates provides defect classification for each reported defect and that helps in defect prioritization. The main objective is to track all the defects and ensure the correct resolution in a timely manner. Read our article on Defect Triaging to know how efficiently we report the defects and help you expedite the debugging process.

The Hurdle – “Lack of communication and collaboration between Developers and QA teams resulting in wastage of time”
The Solution -“20 seconds is all it takes to know your product defect”

At Webomates, the QA team works closely with everyone involved in the development of new features or any modifications that would impact the code. To sum up, we believe that our job is not simply to test the product after a new increment is added, but to also help the whole team deliver the best services.

Decisions need to be taken almost instantaneously. Hence, it is of utmost importance that Product Owners and developers understand and differentiate between a test failure for a trivial issue and a business-critical failure that must be addressed immediately. 

To help developers better visualize the defects, Webomates shares a detailed Defect report with the developers that includes proper summary, description, console logs required by developers, a 20-second defect video (focussing on reproducing the bug and no noise) so developers can run through the video to confirm the bug. A developer can understand if the defect is a valid or invalid defect through that video in 20 seconds.

With this killer feature of a 20 second defect video, it makes for an awesome developer experience and therefore reduces the time to run behind QA to look for issue details.

The Hurdle – “Too little testing done too late.”
The Solution – Shift Left or get behind!

Does your team face burnouts due to too many late-night and last-minute sessions during deployments? This is because teams still feel that testing is the last step in the software lifecycle process and squeeze testing at the end. Testing early is still a hurdle many teams fail to overcome due to faster delivery timelines, thus impacting the overall product quality.

With Webomates’ design mantra “Fix bugs at design, less will go to development”, defects are quickly identified and fixed in the staging environment itself. Shift-Left is also about breaking down silos as it gives an opportunity for bridging the gap between development and testing as it reduces the feedback time between the teams.

With the power combination of Webomates regression testing with Shift-left approach, it helps in building a good product where UI, API, Load and Security are not left out to be tested as a different component at the end.

The Hurdle – “Test case updates and Feature modification brings a gap between Developers and QA”
The Solution – Dynamically adapt to the changes with Self-healing test automation feature.

The most common hurdle is to deal with changes in the features under test as the product keeps upgrading and integrating with new features. This may happen when the development team keeps rapidly updating and releasing the features, or due to dynamic changes in the application system or build process. In either case, the test scripts are easily affected by these changes and test case maintenance becomes inevitable for testers. And that’s when the clash begins and leads to a gap between Development and QA. The solution to bridge this gap is Self-Healing.

Webomates gives the developers a silver bullet with its Self-healing capability. So how does self-healing testing work? Webomates applies AI and ML algorithms to dynamically adapt their testing scope to the changes. Release Notes/Test package analyzer picks what is to be modified and can be updated by the system. The AI detects abnormalities in the existing code and automatically fixes them without human intervention. With the self healing that Webomates provides during the software feature regression test suites are near up-to-date at all times. 

With the elimination of manual intervention and debugging, self-healing mechanisms essentially deliver on the promise of efficiency, and provide automations with a unique competitive advantage.

To know how exactly Webomates can help you, read the article Test smarter-Develop faster

Conclusion

Along with ensuring effective communication and collaboration between Developers and QA teams within defined SLA, Webomates QA team reaches out to developers with the Webomates Quality Quotient matrix matrix where “x % is valid defects, y % invalid defects”. Webomates ensures that its quality quotient is always less than 10%. 

With regression reporting in terms of True pas/True Fail report to effective defect reporting and reviewing, Webomates CQ is a one stop shop for everything that a regression report needs to bridge the gap between Development and QA. 

If you are interested in learning more about Webomates’ CQ service please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com

Tags: QA hurdles, Testing challenges