Blogs | QA InfoTech

14Feb, 2018

Don’t let the bugs bite

With Apple’s confirmation on Meltdown and Spectre, the two major CPU security bugs, causing the slowdown in Mac and all iOS devices, one ponders the impact on users, especially considering more than a billion of iPhones that are already in use. With such a number, the issues accorded to the performance of devices amplifies the need of testing and of ensuring that the bugs are thoroughly accounted for, since the probability of more bugs in an already infested system increases ever so. Read more »

09Feb, 2018

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Bob Dylan’s famous lyrics still linger in one’s mind. While it has been half a century to this song and the political upheaval at the time, the lyrics still stand true, not just in a political sense but also with respect to the field of technology, especially accessibility. With an age old struggle to achieve a rightful place not just in the society but in the digital space as well, there has been a global transformation with the help of people as well as the certain mandates like Section 508, WCAG 2.0 and now, WCAG 2.1 which is on its way to augment this change even further. Read more »

09Feb, 2018

The changing dynamics in software testing with AI

The industry has come a long way over the years in transforming technology from its very roots. Sophia, the humanoid robot has become the ‘living’ example of the progressive nature of technology who not only uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and facial recognition but is the first to be accorded citizenship by Saudi Arabia. This goes onto show the changing dynamics in technology itself today, thus, amplifying the need for testing. Read more »

23Jan, 2018

The connect between evolving technologies and software testing

Software quality and testing is a very versatile space. As testers, we wear multiple hats – we think about the system architecture and implementation, we think about the business cases, we think about end users. We continue to evaluate new technologies entering the market, what it takes to testing them, what tools to leverage, what are the challenges in testing for new domains and markets. These are all important questions to address but what we sometimes miss is if any of these new technologies will make our lives easier as testers.

Whether it be software functional testing, performance testing, localization testing, whatever the area of testing we may work on, one message that is increasingly clear to all software testers, is the need to innovate and question the status quo. For this to happen, testers should not only uni-directionally look at end goal of how to test, but also how to leverage newer solutions to make their test effort more optimal and productive.

A couple of years back we had in fact done a webinar on how to leverage augmented reality to make testing more productive. Today, there was an interesting post we read on how virtual reality helps in the work environment, not just in the tester’s environment, but any work place for that matter. A lot of these newer solutions, especially in the space of machine learning, analytics, AR/VR/MR, IoT, offer a lot of cues to build simple tools or even leverage existing solutions as is to make testing more fun and productive. This is even more important today, as not just testers own quality – there are non-testers also that pitch into the quality effort – if testers can make testing more engaging and extensible across teams through some of these newer techniques, the entire quality effort will soon become cohesive and benefit all stakeholders. For example, the article above talks about how virtual reality brings in more collaboration. Lately we have been talking about the need to engage with end users to bring in new test approaches around exploratory testing such as crowd-sourced testing techniques. Imagine bringing the power of virtual reality into a crowd-sourced testing effort.

Such innovative implementations not only leverage the power and potential of newer technologies but also equally help the testers get a grip on them making them better testers (aka end users) of the newer solutions engineered.

16Jan, 2018

An application is not strong just by implementation but rather by usage too

Web Security Testing has become hugely in demand in the last few years for understandable reasons. Cyber crimes, vulnerabilities being exploited, threats going undetected have all dampened the user confidence in the digital world especially for sensitive transactions, although on the other hand digital revolution is touching newer heights. As practitioners of software quality, app security testing is also a core service we provide. We have increasingly been seeing that an application’s security is not just strong by implementation but also by end user usage.

Granted that a tight security designed and implemented upfront closes a lot of doors in lack of secure usage but a user has his/her share of role to play too. For example, it is alarming to see that even in today’s age of digital awareness, the worst secure passwords for 2017 are ones that even kids would know not to use. Similarly, misuse in sharing information, lack of secure modes of operation especially in open office spaces, lack of using secure networks when accessing digital information on the go, are just some examples of where users let the leash loose from a security angle.

This year, there will be more focus on security at varied levels – web, network, API – organizations that have a bad security reputation will certainly take a hit at an overall market positioning. Web security testing will be on the rise. Security will become a critical non-functional attribute in making a release decision call too. But that said, from an engineering stand point of design and implementation, users have to be more secure in how they operate. They will have to help empower and educate people in their known circles who may not be very digital or security savvy, because end of the day, the security of the digital world is equally in our hands – we are all not just engineers and end users, but also end user advocates for other digital apps to ensure the cyber world is increasingly secure and perpetrators are kept under constant vigil and check.

05Jan, 2018

To a New Year and New Beginnings

With the ushering of 2018, QA InfoTech is all geared up to welcome it with open arms and ideas. 2017 was an eventful year wherein we embarked on a number of opportunities and realized them in their truest sense, whether it be of getting covered in the Nelson Hall Analysis, being in league with Great Places to Work For in India 2017 or evangelizing testing at various conferences in and around India. Read more »

27Dec, 2017

Clear the roadblocks in test automation

As a tester, one may stand on the crossroads of effective test automation. From planning to execution, challenges are bound to obstruct the testing process. These may be many, including some of the key challenges such as:

Test case mapping-
A major roadblock that a tester generally faces is during the mapping of the test case itself. What to test and how to test becomes one of the major concerns during test automation. The things to be kept in mind here, eminently constitute the interpretation of functional requirements into coded automated tests; what needs to be included and automated for optimal resource utilization. This also includes mapping and tracing the whole test coverage via the traceability matrix in order to identify any change in the requirement for the future.

27Dec, 2017

Don’t let the festivities hamper your application’s performance

While the festive season is upon us, e-commerce sites out there are feeling the jitters. Back in November this year, a number of sites like GAME, Lowe’s, Takealot, etc., crashed down during the Black Friday sale due to the huge user-traffic. With Christmas and New Years’ sale this month, e-commerce giants are all geared up to face the same and even worse as a million shoppers would try to cash in on the deals. Such performance bottlenecks won’t just hamper an application but would also lead to a loss of existing as well as potential customers. Read more »

22Dec, 2017

Bring the feeling of togetherness with linguistic testing

On 2nd November 2017, when Coca-Cola released its ad in Saudi Arabia with the tagline “Change has a taste” after King Salman abolished the age old driving ban on women, it received a controversial response- praise for abolishing the ban and on the other hand, criticism over disrespecting the sentiments of the community for using this ruling for its own profit. I give this instance specifically, as it brings to light the cultural nuances that may affect a product’s reception and the effort that needs to be made in order to amalgamate and unify these nuances. Read more »

15Dec, 2017

Pay Heed to DevSecOps

As the industry moves along and catches the wave of DevOps, specific attributes are certainly also catching on – one such focus area being DevSecOps – as the name implies, Security in the world of DevOps. Until a few years ago, security was all about the Top 10 OWASP web vulnerabilities. While that largely still reigns in the world of security testing, product teams have started looking beyond and acknowledging the need, especially for web services and network security testing, as part of app security testing efforts.

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