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Imagine this. It has been two years since your organization started developing its current product. It will not be long before the first version is released, and everyone eagerly anticipates it. The stakes are high, so people are nervous, but they are confident about the work they have done.
Finally, the big day arrives... and it isn't very good.
There's no doubt that the application looks superb and offers many great features. There are, however, a lot of embarrassing bugs. The reviews are unforgiving, and the users are unsatisfied.
What could have been done to prevent this? Proper software testing is the answer, of course. As we move forward in this blog, let us find out how software testing is an important aspect in web development and why businesses need to see its importance and choose the right test.
Business expectations vs. reality
It is human to make mistakes, and everyone does it, no matter how big of a perfectionist they are. However, business organizations have their own end goals and expectations.
In essence, business success is indicated by the frequency with which actual results match expectations. To accomplish its end goals, every company must overcome the consequences of human error.
An enterprise cannot use manual error to justify compromising its product. It is necessary to have something in place to identify the mistakes in a product to ensure that it is of high quality. This makes software testing essential for software development companies.
This post will discuss software testing basics, including what it is and why it is crucial for business. Let's begin!
Software Testing 101
The purpose of software testing is to identify errors in a developed product. Furthermore, it determines whether the actual results match the expected ones and identifies gaps, defects, or missing requirements.
Before a product is launched to the market, it must be tested. Different aspects of a product are examined, analyzed, observed, and evaluated. It also depends on the features that you will be using (e.g., online booking in coworking software, employee tracking in CRM software, email automation in outreach software, etc.)
Most high-quality software testing companies combine automatic and manual testing. Following the completion of tests, the testers inform the development team of their findings. Ultimately, software testing is about delivering a quality product to the customer.
Why is Software Testing important?
Startups often skip testing. Typically, they overlook this step due to a lack of funds. In their opinion, it won't have a significant impact. Bugs can always be fixed after launch. However, if you want to make a positive first impression with the client, you probably don't want to deliver a buggy mess of a product. This is one of the reasons why testing is essential.
To fully grasp the importance of software testing, we should correlate it with some real-world examples:
- As a result of a software bug, Okta, a US authentication company, recently experienced a digital breach that may have compromised the details of its users. Needless to say, this has adversely affected the company's reputation.
- On September 16, 2016, Yahoo suffered a major data breach affecting 500 million users.
- In 2015, it was reported that the Royal Bank of Scotland could not process about 600,000 payments because of a bug. This led to a 66 million pound fine.
- When Flipkart, an India-based e-commerce company, launched its "Big Billion Sale" in October 2014, its website could not handle the traffic, leading to downtime, order cancellation, etc. This issue negatively affected the site's reputation.
Likewise, established businesses must maintain their client base and their reputation. Therefore, they must ensure that the end user receives flawless products. Below, we will discuss a few specific reasons why software testing is crucial for good software development.
Compatibility
In the past, customers mostly worked on massive desktop computers. This is no longer the case. Products must be tested for compatibility with mobile devices in this mobile-first era.
Suppose your organization created a website. Testing should be conducted on different device resolutions to determine whether the website runs properly on different types of screens.
A growing number of browser options is another reason testing is becoming increasingly important. The same thing that works well on Chrome may not work on Safari or Internet Explorer. A cross-browser test, which checks whether the application works on different browsers, is therefore necessary.
Security
When using a product, customers are often required to reveal personal information. Before the release of the software, security testing is essential to prevent hackers from accessing this data. Through proper testing, an organization ensures that its products are secure, increasing the safety of its customers.
For instance, a bank application or an e-commerce store might require payment information. Leaving security-related bugs unattended in this situation could lead to severe financial loss.
Keeping data safe is another part of security. Nowadays, many people store their data in the cloud. You probably also store your files and photos on Google Drive or iCloud. Can you imagine what would happen if all your data were lost? It sounds like a nightmare, doesn't it?
It's essential to test a product to ensure that data is not lost or corrupted and to protect it from hackers.
Overall quality
Only a genuinely high-quality product can bring value to your customers. This means you must ensure that your product is user-friendly, bug-free, and delivers on any promises made during the marketing and sales cycle.
Before releasing a product, organizations must test applications and fix bugs that testing uncovers. To maximize the customer experience, your team should resolve issues early in the development process.
How to choose the right form of software testing for you?
There are many types of software testing. The various types of feedback provide different kinds of information, so you cannot use them interchangeably. Additionally, each form of testing comes with its challenges and costs.
With limited resources, how can you choose between different types of testing so that you maximize test coverage while using your resources efficiently? An effective way to address this is through the test automation pyramid concept.
You can use the test automation pyramid, or testing pyramid, to consider the various types of software testing and pick the best one.
Unit tests are at the bottom. The process of writing these tests is simpler and cheaper than most others. Because they don't rely on external dependencies, they run quickly and provide precise feedback. Therefore, performing a lot of them makes sense.
In the middle of the pyramid, we have integration tests or service tests. Due to their ability to validate the integration between units and "talk" with real dependencies, they offer more realistic feedback than unit tests.
They are also more complex to write and maintain, slower to run and offer less precise feedback. Although integration tests are valuable, they have their limitations, so it makes sense to use them sparingly.
End-to-end tests comprise the pyramid's top level. These offer the most realistic experience since they simulate how a real user would operate the application. As you might imagine, they are more expensive to write, maintain, and execute, as well as slower and more fragile.
These tests should be part of your test suite, but you should have a limited number.
Conclusion
Delivering the best possible product to customers is of the utmost importance for any company, and software testing can help you do that. Your products may require different testing procedures depending on their nature and scope.
The bottom line is that no deliverable should be considered ready-to-go until it receives a green light from the testing team.
Enterprises should understand that customer trust is not easy to earn. Your products need to be consistent and reliable. Software testing is, therefore, a vital part of the development process.
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