DEV Community: Anastasia

Top 3 victims of cyberattacks in 2020

Anastasia — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 10:40:41 +0000

The beginning of the new 2021 year is a good time for summing up last year. Risk-Based Security research shows that by the end of September, the number of records exposed was about 36 billion. This fact made 2020 the worst year in terms of the total number of records exposed.

Experts say that an increasing number of cyberattacks are related to pandemic Covid-19 and its consequences. At the beginning of the pandemic in spring FBI reported about 4000 cybercrimes daily. When in the pre-coronavirus period, they received approximately 1000 complaints daily.

Jürgen Stock, Interpol Secretary General, reported that cybercriminals took advantage of the situation as well as people's fears and panic about the pandemic. Cybercriminals created whole campaigns of phishing emails related to Covid-19 on behalf of the government, health authorities, famous people with a demand to transfer money or provide private information. As a result, thousands of people around the world became victims of scammers.

Healthcare system

The most vulnerable sector became the healthcare sector. The research's showing that 11,5% of incidents related to healthcare. The main reason for high hackers' attention is that healthcare is a 'national critical infrastructure. Attacks on this economic area are the most dangerous, as they involve humans' lives.

Scammers are using phishing emails, inattention of employees and implementing ransomware into a hospital system. It leads to blocking systems, data, and disruption of healthcare services. Besides, hackers are using medical equipment with security vulnerabilities as a loophole to get into the hospital system. Devices like heart rate monitor systems can be hacked and become an entry point for attack.

In September alone, 250 hospitals one of the US hospital services underwent cyberattacks. As a result, medical personnel was unable to access documentation, prescriptions, and medical records. It slowed down hospital work and took employees’ time that they can devote to patients. Moreover, hospital system hacking leads to failures of wireless vital-signs monitoring equipment, and employees can miss alarm signals.

At the same time in Düsseldorf, Germany happened the first incident related to cyberattacks that led to the death of a patient. Cybercriminals hacked and disable hospital service, and a critically ill patient died when she was compelled to transfer to another city.

Cybercriminals understand the value of labs, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment companies in pandemic times. During a year, thousands of companies researching Covid-19 and vaccines were hacked. It slowed down work and delayed the developing vaccine process.

In June, cybercriminals blocked servers and systems of the University of California that was doing research on Covid-19 cure. Scammers demanded a ransom for a tool that could encrypt data that is important for researching. The University of California reported that they paid approximately $1.14m for the encryption software. Cybersecurity organizations insist on not paying the ransom as it finances hackers and facilitates their activity. Victims should report to the police about incidents. Although many experts admit that companies have no right way out in this situation.

Remote workers

Pandemic reshaped the way people were working and forced many companies to switch to a work-from-home.
2020 Remote Work-From-Home Cybersecurity Report revealed that a third of companies were badly prepared for switching to a remote. 85% of the companies delayed cybersecurity decisions to speed up switching and ensured business continuity. And as a result of a 69% of security risks related to work-from-home risks.

It opened new opportunities for cybercriminals. According to the research of a cybersecurity vendor Netwrix, 25% of interviewed IT companies employees claimed they faced ransomware or other malware attacks during the first three months of the pandemic. A robust software security strategy can prevent problems associated with high cybersecurity risks. The strategy can include various types of testing as vulnerabilities or penetration testing. Professional pentest companies can reveal vulnerabilities in systems and teach employees how to avoid cybersecurity risks. Many experts recommend test systems regularly as cybercriminals’ skills are improving and becoming more sophisticated.

Remote working opens a wider surface for cybercriminals as employees are working from different devices, platforms, and networks. Corporate computers have more robust security than personal ones and cybercriminals can use this vulnerability. Besides, employees expose business-critical applications that can lead to data breaches.

An additional reason for increasing hacking risk is a lack of communication among employees, especially in big companies. When an employee gets a suspicious email, he can't refer to someone in his office with questions or advice, and emails occur as the only way to communicate.

Recently cybercriminals sent emails to the employees of one IT company that imitate messaging from the HR department. Messages reported about reopened offices and demand to return to work in them. The emails contained a form that must be filled urgently by employees and provide sensitive information.
Experts who researched this campaign said that such letters were sent to about 100 000 inboxes bypassing Google G Suite email security.

Private Data

The pandemic opened new ways for cybercriminals to steal private data. At the beginning of the pandemic, scammers used a Covid-19 panic by creating phishing emails on behalf of WHO, government, or hospital services.

According to COVID-19 Clicks: How Phishing Capitalized on a Global Crisis report, one in five respondents received a phishing email related to COVID-19. Usually, such emails include a link to an infected site. One visit to a page is enough to get a virus that can get access to web browser cookies and steal private data. Cybersecurity company Proofpoint reported that hackers sent fake Covid-19 test results that include malicious ransomware.

Another popular cyber hackers' trick was programs and apps related to monitoring pandemic situations. After installing malware on a victim's computer or smartphone, hackers get remote access to all data on a device, encrypt it and blackmail a user. Apple limited adding Covid-19 related programs to AppleStore, and Google actively has been deleting suspicious apps to reduce spreading malware. Nevertheless, many users became victims of an app named 'CovidLock' for Android platforms. Malware blocked access to a smartphone and demanded a ransom of 100$ within 48 hours. Otherwise, all content on the phone would be deleted.

Experts name one of the main reasons for data breaches and cyberattacks related to human error. In the last year, there have been a dozen incidents due to human inattention. The national public health agency of Wales reported that personal information about 18 000 residents of Wales who were tested on Covid-19 was exposed 'by mistake.' An agency employee uploaded personal information on a public domain where anybody could get access to data.

Another similar situation happened in Delaware when a healthcare employee sent unencrypted emails with results of testing and private information about 10 000 people. These incidents are dangerous not only because scammers can steal and take advantage of private data, but because they undermine confidence among people. And as a result, people avoid testing and spread the virus.

2020 has shown that companies should be attentive to cybersecurity issues. In 2021 cybersecurity remains of critical importance for business. PwC research reveals that 55% of companies plan to increase their cybersecurity budget for 2021 despite an economic crisis.

Automate vs manual cross-browser testing

Anastasia — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 09:05:17 +0000

In a perfect world, there is only one browser and device on which all programs work. In the real world, there are many browsers and platforms with their requirements for efficient work. That's why we need cross-browser testing to ensure accessibility for all users.

Cross-browser testing is a type of software testing with a primary goal to confirm that the application has full functionality on different browsers with multiple combinations. Professionals recommend conducting cross-browser testing after the system has been checked for defects by other types of testing. Only in this case, it will be possible to say that the revealed incorrect scenarios are related specifically to the features of the browser, and were not missed at other stages.

Usually, clients decide on target web browsers for a product. But as QA-engineers you should analyze a product and present to a client the best decisions. According to Statcounter, the most popular worldwide web browser is Chrome with up to 64% of users. The second place is Safari(19%) and the third is Firefox(almost 4%).

You may face three big challenges during conducting cross-browser testing:

You can't test all combinations. Browsers depend on the operating systems on which they are installed. We have a deal with different versions of OS, 32-bit, and 64-bit processors, versions of updates, etc. There are thousands of combinations of browser version and OS version. And a number of these combinations are growing as new browsers or new versions of OS release. It means it's impossible to test the app with all of them.
Auto-updates. Browsers don't require downloading updates manually anymore. It's happening automatically, even without the user's attention or interaction. Browsers frequently update — approximately every eight weeks and each browser has its dates to update. It can lead to bugs or incorrect function responses in a testing product due to new browser updates.
Automation is a hard deal. Two previous challenges are resolved by automation. But it isn't easy to implement. First, most tools for automation have limited facilities. Second, it takes deep knowledge and vast experience to write automation code and prepare test cases.
Failures in browsers. Some browsers have bugs or incorrect implementation of new functions. It can affect testing websites or web apps.

There are two classic techniques that are applied for cross-browser testing.

Automation testing

Automation testing is a process in software testing using automated tools, scripts and algorithms.

During automation testing, you can face many challenges such as:

Incorrect response. Sometimes during testing, a system can give a false-positive response, even if there are no issues in code. Thus, algorithms can mislead QA-engineers and they will waste time searching for unexisting errors. Vice versa, a false-negative can happen when a system has failures, but an automated algorithm doesn't trace it. This situation is more dangerous as missed failures can cause new ones.
Wrong indicators. Sometimes testers wrongly assign a value to ID for web-elements or miss it. It leads to failures and problems as automation scripts can't find a proper web-element.
Automation in a cloud. One of the disadvantages of automation testing is a requirement to test scripts within browsers that are installed on your computer. Thus, you need to install hundreds of browser versions, which is inconvenient. The solution is to use cloud platforms that can maintain up to 2000 browsers.
What to automate. Many QA-engineers don’t understand which test cases they should automate and which shouldn’t. Some of them try to automate as many test cases as they can. As a result, development costs increase, whereas work efficiency doesn't. Some engineers rely on luck and automate random test cases. But automation testing is useful only if you have a deep understanding of what you should automate.

Despite challenges to automate cross-browser testing is a robust way to increase speed, volume, and efficiency of work. It has many benefits that can increase the efficiency of your testing process.

You can use it as a form of integration testing. It can help to reveal problems that were missed during unit testing. For example, such problems can be failures within compound interactions among components of code or critical changes in API that lead to failures in code.
High efficiency of repetitive tests. Usually, cross-browser test cases are permanently repetitive for different browsers and operating systems. Such a task becomes tougher with the expansion of a project. Lest to waste the time and efforts of testers, repetitive tests should be automated. But you should ensure that all areas of testing are included in a script.
Facilitate regression testing. Regression testing helps to ensure that new features don't cause crashes in a system. When you work with an already released application it's important to perform regression testing to implement new functionality faster. It can be exhausting and continuous with manual testing. Yet such delay can affect popularity among users, as they can switch to your competitors who already have new features. But with automation, you can shrink regression testing time from weeks to a couple of hours.
Better test accuracy. Monotonous work can tire engineers and be time-consuming. Besides, tests with a large amount of data have a higher chance to get incorrect results due to errors related to the human factor. Through automation, you can avoid such problems. Engineers can leave monotonous work to algorithms and focus on the primary goals of the project. Besides, automation can make reports that facilitate writing new test cases and analyzing a situation.

Manual testing

Manual testing is easier and cheaper than automation, but also, it's time-consuming and reduces testers' efficiency. However, sometimes you can't deal without manual testing during cross-browser testing. Such cases cover areas when automation can't replace humans' mind and perception.

Let's consider cases when manual testing is necessary:

To reveal unobvious failures. Finding some failures depends on the experience of testers and the knowledge of the target system and browser. Also, some bugs can happen under specific conditions that automation testing can't cover. Through exploratory testing, which is always manual, testers can find atypical bugs and problems.
Check a visual environment. Automation can cope with checking the correct location of visual elements. But testing of app appearance, smoothness of animations, and overall usability it's work for humans. Thus, only through manual testing, you can ensure how animations work or how components of design look in different browsers and under different conditions. HTML5 and CSS3 open new opportunities and allow developers to create new effects and elements. Moreover, effects can be displayed even if JavaScript is disabled. But as HTML5 and CSS3 aren't standard, their abilities can be displayed in some browsers incorrectly.
Check UI. Design components must not only look good but respond correctly. With manual functional testing, testers can check how different fields, buttons and forms behave on different browsers.

Sum up

We considered two classic methods of cross-browser testing. Each of them has both pros and cons. Automation testing facilitates a testing process when manual testing is getting goals in the areas where automation is helpless.
They both were designed to cooperate and work simultaneously for the best results.

How AI is changing software testing?

Anastasia — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 12:58:38 +0000

The world is changing faster than ever. And now artificial intelligence is a common thing in the work and life of thousands of people. AI is a robust, smart, customizer way to deliver software products to consumers faster.
The primary goal of AI is to cope with information that only humans can process, such as visual information, speech recognition, patterns, object recognition, the ability to learn from past experience.

Such a large and rapidly growing field as software testing is implementing AI into a testing process too. According to the World Quality Report 2019-2020, 21% of CEOs of software testing companies claim that their companies are putting AI trials. And 16% of respondents already use AI in test activities.

How can AI help software testing? Why is it important? What kind of benefit software testers can retrieve from AI? And what are the biggest challenges?

Why is AI in software testing important?

Computer scientists are working on the improvement of AI, and with each year, it becomes smarter. Notwithstanding scientists' hard work AI isn't smart enough to replace humans and can't work independently from AI specialists. However, AI can be a great helper to facilitate work, reduce risks and failures. Automation testing is a robust method for reducing risks and facilitating testing activity, but it has limitations. And AI is perfect for eliminating these boundaries and making automated testing more efficient.

How is AI improving software testing?

Expands test coverage
AI can't replace humans, but it can make the testing process faster and more convenient. When programmers develop and add new features and functions, the amount of code lines grows, so it's hard to track down possible failures manually. AI checks thousands of code lines in seconds and finds failures faster than testers. Besides, AI can develop and adapt to changes in code. AI can be programmed to distinguish failures and new functions in a system. When programmers make code changes, it can lead to failing tests as a system can't find the elements it needs to interact with, but AI can identify which locator to use to detect elements.
Algorithms AI can choose paths in complex systems to identify failures. Simultaneously, AI learns on received data and identifies new user journeys inside the system to find potential bugs. It increases the coverage and performance of a testing activity.

AI doesn't make mistakes associated with human factors and doesn't get tired. AI can gather and sort a large amount of data, fast and correctly. These factors help software testers to concentrate on other specific parts of testing activity and deliver products faster.

Better automation testing
The main goal of automation testing is to speed up a testing process and reduce time-consuming. But there are some fields where automation testing can't cope with. For example, usability or functional testing that needs human perception and mind. But as we said above, AI focuses on tasks that only humans can cope with. Of course, now AI can't perceive and process information from the external world like humans, but AI has some achievements in this field. Some AI tools for software testing can provide automated visual testing. Visual testing helps to ensure that every UI element looks correct, and an interface hasn't visual mistakes. AI can identify failures in colors or shapes of elements that humans may miss.

Predicts failures and bugs
A testing process isn't a one-time process. Testing is always a repeating cycle to identify new bugs or how code changes affect the system overall.
Continuous testing is a part of automation testing to identify risks and provide quick feedback. Implementing AI algorithms in this process allows testers to observe results and detect regularity or tendency. Also, AI can provide data for analytic with possible bottlenecks inside the system. According to this data, testers can eliminate risk before a failure happens.

Writes test cases

Spidering AI is a new approach that can write test cases or its part by crawling code and learning on gathered data. This method helps to save time and understand what part of the code to test.

AI algorithms scan code, collects data and creates a dataset with patterns. When something critical happens, AI compares the existing patterns and the new one. After this, AI reveals problems and alerts about it. Software testers analyze these alerts and can decide which failures are eliminated.

Challenges with AI in software testing

Although AI is a smart system, it is created by humans. Hence, AI can make mistakes too. And a big problem of AI is a high level of trust in its algorithms. Implicit faith in AI algorithms can lead to missed failures and risks. Lack of knowledge and experience of testers leads to wrong data interpretations and the inability to identify where AI algorithms mislead engineers. Another problem is selecting a type of testing for AI algorithms and incomprehension of what test cases should undergo with AI. Test engineers run all test cases or some set without understanding what they will get as a result.

Hence another challenge — lack of skills and knowledge among test engineers. Companies that intend to implement AI into testing activity should educate employees or pay attention to specialists with knowledge of deep learning principles and applying generic modeling tools to testing.

Sum up

Software development changes drastically. Artificial intelligence will change the whole software industry to the better side. But does this mean that software testers disappear? No. The tester profession will reshape to new rules. It will become more strategic. Software engineers will focus on key testing goals, leaving routine work for AI.

AI is a perfect partner for DevOps, and together these two approaches can deliver products faster, increase profit and conversion. Hence, more and more companies will apply AI technology.

How technology is saving a restaurant business during the pandemic?

Anastasia — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 12:06:42 +0000

Pandemic COVID-19 is dictating new terms for the hospitality industry. Many restaurants, hotels, cafes had to struggle to survive during a lockdown. Experts from Nation Restaurant Association predict that the restaurant business will lose up to $240 billion by the end of 2020. Such arduous times force establishments to switch on online ordering and delivery service. Also, consumers attend to avoid crowded places and more willingly make orders online. Stats from Toast shows that consumers spent more money during online-ordering. The average check size of an online-order is 23% larger than in-store checks.

The restaurant industry is a big part of the economy, with a large number of workplaces. And the primary goal of the whole industry is to survive. One part of restaurants will close completely, another one that is more adaptive and savvier will keep on its feet. Thus, the industry needs to adapt and transform, implement new digital technologies, improve online service, and provide a new contactless experience.

In addition, experts predict that ordering online will become more frequent and everyday occurrence. Such changes help people to stay safe and engage them to order more from home, not spreading the virus. Restaurants that manage to implement the best decisions have more chances to reopen after the pandemic.

Twenty or thirty years ago the pandemic had led to leaving the market a great number of restaurants without any chance to reopen. But nowadays technology and the internet give a great opportunity for the restaurant business.

Online ordering and reserving

Recent research has shown that the main competitors of restaurants are not other restaurants, but customers’ homes. 89% of respondents claimed that they prefer to stay at home for dinner neither to eat at restaurants. So, restaurants should ensure health safety for clients and provide digital decisions.

In a world where almost half of the population has smartphones, it's easy to stay in touch with clients by having a restaurant business app. Thus why so many companies have mobile apps.

Clients prefer to use a mobile app for ordering rather than a website as it is more convenient and personalized, has good UX and notifications. With a mobile app, you can expand the business and attract more traffic and clients to your restaurant. Many restaurants offer a discount by ordering in a mobile app. Also, clients use third-party delivery apps to order, as they have a variety of restaurants and bigger choices. But such apps have a great disadvantage. Third-party food delivery companies like Uber Eats, GrubHub, have fees, some of them charge up to 20-30% of revenue. As a result, this is forcing restaurants to increase prices on a menu.

These conditions affect customers who are suffering from an economic crisis and can’t pay more. Consumers tempt to interact directly with restaurants, they avoid apps with hidden fees or monthly subscriptions. Hence why so many company owners invest in software app development. However, the level of competition in the mobile app market is growing. Users tend to use only apps without failures and errors and with great user experience. Thus why the popularity of mobile app testing services is growing.

Social distancing is one of a precautionary measure that is forcing restaurants to shrink the number of tables and bar seats, increase the distance between tables, etc. The result is reducing capacity and profit. Solutions are tools that offer virtual waitlists and booking platforms. Tools with a virtual waitlist allow managing queues and enter changes in schedule, and the system can automatically notify customers about it. Virtual waitlists prevent crowding and long waiting. This is convenient not only for customers as it saves their time but for entrepreneurs as it prevents restaurant downtime.

Low-touch economic

In current days people avoid touching things that can occur as potential sources of the virus, like money or handrails. Restaurants are public places that bring a lot of risks. But with mobile phones, restaurant owners can reduce customer anxiety and secure customers and employees.

Mobile payments provide contactless transactions without interaction with material money. Mobile apps can gather and save customers' data and offer the best choice that makes ordering quicker and more convenient.

Some suppliers found another decision. They provided QR-code with a menu that clients can scan and don't download an app. Some restaurants introduced "no contact" zones, where interactions are minimal, for example with a QR-code for ordering on tables. Pandemic and online ordering forced companies to improve and design a new type of packaging that maintains food better in the right temperature regime. To build trust, restaurants attach individual labels to show that the package is intact from a restaurant kitchen to a client's house.

What about the future?

Now nobody knows when the pandemic ends. However, scientists claim it will happen after the release of the vaccine in early 2021.
By that time, restaurants should adhere to strict safety guidelines and work by new pandemic rules. New technology and new ways of service won't disappear after the pandemic. Specialists admit there were changes in hospitality service to technology, and pandemic speeded up the process. So, even when the pandemic ends, consumers' behavior gets a new pattern with online ordering and countless interactions.

Fast food restaurants will stay industry leaders in implementing technologies as the most advanced and fast-expanding ones. Such enterprises like KFC or McDonalds adopt new technology faster and bring to the next level the whole industry. For example, McDonald's bought AI from Dynamic Yield last year. This AI is intended to predict the behavior and expectation of customers. It will improve service and stand out McDonald's among competitors.

Summary

Pandemic reshaped customers' behavior and, thus, overall industry. Restaurants should adapt to new rules, implement best decisions, and roll to new technologies. Only thus companies can survive in such uncertain times and prepare for a new stage in hospitality service development.

How to avoid risks when you hire an outsourcing QA team?

Anastasia — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 09:46:18 +0000

The outsourcing service market is growing with each year more and more. According to Statista, the global market size of outsourced services in 2019 is 92.5 billion dollars, which is much higher than in previous years. Experts from Global Market Insights predict a growing software testing market at a CAGR (Compound annual growth rate) of over 6% from 2020 to 2026. The development of technologies will facilitate a growing market.

Reasons for the risks of outsourcing

Such market expansion is the mark of popularity and demand for outsourcing services among corporations. Entrepreneurs choose to outsource because it's cheaper than maintaining a QA team, you have a vast choice of QA professionals, and it can save you time.
But when you dare to hire an outsourcing team to implement in a development process, you take the risk.

Such risks associated with:
Lack of control. When you handover part of a development process on outsourcing you have a risk of losing control of it. There is a risk of an inability to monitor productivity and quality. A deal can get even worse with weak management and a lack of communication between vendor and client.

Lack of experience and outdated technologies. When you hire an outsourcing team, you can't know how experienced it is, how it solves problems during a workflow, and how enough its knowledge to expand and implement new techniques if necessary. In this case, a decision is to ask a vendor team to demonstrate a portfolio with projects related to yours.

Extra charges. One of the main goals of outsourcing is reducing costs. But you don't pay only for the service. There are many costs in outsourcing — buying software tools, additional testing, setup costs, rework, and so on.

Breach of duties. Outsourcing teams may break deadlines, don't fulfill requests, or break process plans, and all it gets complicated if a team is located on the other side of the globe. Meticulous research and signing the Service level agreement help you to avoid problems and lawsuits.

What to consider before outsourcing?

To avoid risks, let's consider moments to pay attention to before hire outsourcing QA team.

Experience and a full scope of services
Even if you hire a QA team for one kind of testing, bear in mind that you may need a broader range of services later. Ensure that vendor is able to cover a wide scope of testing and have sufficient numbers of testers to provide them. Competent teams have their techniques, approaches, and frameworks in software testing. You can ask a vendor about methods that a team has used and is implemented in a testing process.

Level of trust
Reliable and professional teams arrange a full pack of documentation and can provide it to you at any moment of a workflow. Thus, you are informed about accomplished work, testing plans, and scenarios. One of the most important documents that is signed between vendors and clients is the Service Level Agreement, which adjusts deadlines, quality measures, stage of a testing process, and so on. Ensure that a vendor can provide these requirements, and you can trust it.

Easy and self-managed team
The main idea of outsourcing is transferring part of a development process in third-part hands to provide a client to focus on core operations. Thus, it's important if a vendor team manages the whole process from writing documentation to controlling the testing software process during development. Also, the vendor should provide a QA manager who adjusts communication between the client and the outsourcing team.

What are the common mistakes when hiring an outsourcing team?

Despite technology development and permanent improvement of development methods, such as DevOps, outsourcing still often fails. There are many reasons for this, such as poor management, lack of knowledge and competence in operations that are outsourced, and so on. QA has specific features, ignorance of which can lead to inefficient cooperation between vendor and client.
There are the most common mistakes that lead to a high risk in the process of QA outsourcing.

Non set up or poorly designed test plans and cases.

These documents are an essential part of testing software. A test plan is a roadmap for testing with all points through a process. It contains such information as a scope of testing, schedule of a workflow, testing practices, etc. Before starting to cooperate with a team, your test manager or business analyst should adjust all questions associated with a testing process and negotiate a test plan. It saves you from misunderstandings and losing money.

Incorrectly chosen testing methodology
Since software testing is an integral part of software development, methods like Agile are implemented in a software testing process too. With the right approach, the testing process becomes safer and faster. But lack of experience and misunderstanding of the process can lead to the wrong choice of methodology. For example, if you chose a waterfall methodology, your team won't be able to make fast corrections to the testing process due to strict segmentation inside this method.

Incomplete regression cycle.
The main goal of regression testing is to reveal new bugs after changing code and make sure that previously found bugs are eliminated. To have more accurate results regression testing is conducted at an early stage of the development process and repeated during each sprint. Thus, your team is staying informed about program efficiency. But with project expansion, some QA-teams shrink regression testing or reject it at all due to difficult and complex realization. Overall, this leads to incorrect work of a program. Indeed, regression testing in big projects it's a hard issue. In this case, we recommend to switch to automation regression testing and to design a testing strategy according to this approach.

No bug reports and metrics for tracking bugs.
Tracking bugs and metrics for tracking bugs allows a team to gather data and analyze it. With data, you can see bottlenecks in your program, problem areas, and implement additional testing. Bug reports reveal what steps led to errors and prevent them in further software development. One of the important metrics in QA is defect density. It reveals the total amount of bugs during one period of development. This data allows a team to choose testing strategies and ensures readiness to release.

Sum up

Risks exist in all fields of our life, especially in such vulnerable areas as a business. Understanding the challenges, you can reduce or eliminate risks. QA outsourcing offers a big choice of teams and services. Knowing the specificity of this field, you can make up requirements and choose the right outsourcing team that only brings benefits to your business.

How to choose testing tools for your team’s goals

Anastasia — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 12:43:18 +0000

The market offers a large number of testing tools, but not every tool can be right for you. Because the results of testing highly depend on choosing the right tool, we will help you define the key criteria tool selection and provide examples of the most effective software testing tools.

Test Management

Test management is one of the important parts of the testing process.The goals of test management are timely execution of tasks by team members, monitors the quality of these tasks, and generally controls the test process. For the test manager, it’s important to detect the problem in time and solve it. Therefore, for coordinated work, a manager needs a tool that can help manage the team, collect results, and conduct tests.

What is a test management tool? This is a tool that helps optimize testing management, keeps reports on performed tests, test plans, and allows you to interact with other members in the testing process. All tools differ in a set of functions and features.

Important criteria for choosing a tool:

Regular reporting. The tool should provide a detailed report after each test and save such a report to be possible to compare the results of performed tests. The reporting should contain such data as test status, numbers of passed and failed tests, the progress of the test plan, list of performed tests, etc. The reports help testers to find problem areas in software testing and report about the results to the client.
Integration with other testing tools. If the test management tool integrates with other programs, such as bug tracking programs, this is the right choice. Such functionality is important for a quick team response to a detected error.
Adaptability and flexibility. It is important to be able to configure parameters for each of test-cases while working with them. Testing software engineers conduct a large number of tests, and the tool should provide enough features to customize the test for each case.

Examples of tools:

TestTrail

Integration with Jira.
Real-time test results.
Management of test cases and test cycles.
Possibility to create, store, and edit test scripts.
The ability to combine test cases for different operating systems, platforms, browsers.

Xray

Integration with Jira.
Integration with automated testing systems, CI integrations.
Built-in REST API.

PractiTest.

Integration with bug trackers and automation tools.
The ability to reuse tests, flexibility and the ability to customize workflows.
Data visualization.

Automation testing

Automation testing is the opposite of manual testing. Automated testing uses software to detect bugs in code without human intervention in the process. Such testing saves time and enhances human efficiency, but requires a large budget. Automation testing is suitable for large projects, regression testing, performance testing, load testing, or highly repeatable functional test cases.

Even though tests are performed automatically, manual testers and developers also take part in this process, for example, they create test cases. Therefore, when choosing a tool for automated testing, it is necessary to consider the needs of each participant in the process.

What is an automation testing tool? It's a tool that allows you to automate part of the test process with minimal human intervention.

Important criteria for choosing a tool:

Availability of training documentation, manuals, technical support. Your team can include both beginners and experienced staff. Some of them might not have come across automated testing or a specific program. It is important that each member of the team can delve into the process without wasting extra time. Some tools provide lessons on working with their products and ongoing support.
Cross-platform. Some automated testing tools are developed for specific platforms only. The owners of the program or application want to cover as many platforms as possible, this fact affects on product testing. Therefore, to optimize the testing process, select tools that can support multiple platforms and OS. Also, note that the products must work on previous versions of the OS.
Integration Continuous. According to Katalon 55%, QA engineers pay attention to this feature choosing automation tools. Continuous integration allows you to identify errors in the program code in the early stages, which reduces the cost of fixing an error. CI is a software development practice in which developers constantly merge code into one common branch. Automated testing is a requirement for CI. Therefore, pay attention to the tool that supports CI implementation.

Examples of tools:

Selenium

Open-source tools with support for a large number of programming languages (Java, Python, C #, Ruby, Groovy, JavaScript and others).
Supports several operating systems and browsers.
For a full-fledged work of automated testing with Selenium you should use third-party platforms.

TestingWhiz.

Codeless test automation tool.
Integrate with Jira, Mantis, TFS, and FogBugz bug tracking tools.
Has the ability to save and reuse run tests in browsers.
Record test cases and allows you to see detailed information about the testing progress. Especially useful in regression tests, due to built-in keywords.

Ranorex Studio.

Support for multiple platforms
Ability to test iOS and Android on real devices or simulators.
Integration with Selenium.

Performance testing

Performance testing is a type of testing that determines how the components of a system
work in certain circumstances. Performance testing is a broad term that includes different types of testing: load testing, stress testing, volume testing, etc. Such testing does not indicate defects in the program but sets the work standard for the program. Performance testing determines such parameters as speed, scalability, stability, resource usage under the conditions of a certain load.

What is the performance testing tool? This is a tool that generates customized activity on the system to evaluate software performance.

Important criteria for choosing a tool:

Replay the recorded business application/script support. The script allows you to simulate the actions of a real user and thus create a script for the operation of new business processes. Record availability allows the tool to connect to the browser and record the real interactions between the product and the user, and thus improve this scenario.
Availability of testing environment. Test environment - this environment is identical to the one in which the product will work, for each tested product created their test environment. Therefore, the tool should have enough resources and capacities to create a large number of testing environments. If the tool doesn't have such the feature, it will not be able to generate the required amount of traffic for your product.
Tool efficiency. This parameter means how many virtual users tool will be able to generate on one test working device. The higher this parameter, the more virtual users the tool can create. If you have a large business, you should pay attention to this indicator.

Examples of tools:

WebLOAD

Has support for multiple protocols
Ability to generate a load of the environment from a local computer or cloud services.
The integrated development environment (IDE) allows you to customize, manage and record test.

Apache JMeter.

An open-source tool that supports Java-based applications.
Cross-browser and cross-platform.
Supports multiple load injectors with a single controller.
Has ability to a repetition of testing scenarios in real-time;
Ability to integrate with BlazeMeter to increase test environment.

NeoLoad

An open-source tool with integration with CI servers for automatic test execution.
The tool is available for deployment in SaaS.
Has the ability to simulate the activity of interactions with the end-user product, for example, submitting forms, searching, registering, etc.

Conclusion

Choosing the right test tool is not an easy, but very important task. In many ways, the test results depend on the right choice testing tool. No matter which tool you've chosen and on which purposes, it should comply with the following general principles:

Simplicity and flexibility in use.
Integration with all stages of product development
Test Automation Maintenance
Real-time reporting
Easy adaptation of the tool to the work process
Support for End-to-End Traceability