QA transformation

  The Internet of Things (IoT) market is expanding rapidly with new devices being installed to automate devices, systems, and networks. According to Statista, the total installed base of IoT devices is projected to touch 13.8 billion units by the end of 2021, and leapfrog to 30.9 billion units by 2025. The IoT ecosystem is likely to change the way people lead their lives by taking smart computing to the physical world. This will make the scope of computing even more decentralized and distributed. The profusion of so many devices connected to the internet generating, processing, and transmitting data streams needs to be stringently tested for quality. This is to ensure the data streams lead to correct decision-making in a real-time environment. Given that distributed and remotely located IoT systems have to process humongous volumes of data, they are open to being exploited by threat actors. The multifarious challenges related to the security and scalability of IoT systems call for ...

  The speed at which enterprises across domains are going online by deploying software applications, the chances of security-related vulnerabilities being present in such applications have increased manifold. The rising incidences of cybercrime are a testament to software applications not being robust enough to meet the cybersecurity challenges of the day. According to statistics, the online world witnesses more than 100k malicious websites and 10,000 malicious files on a daily basis. Even Google has registered more than 2 million phishing sites as of January 2021 – a 27 percent increase compared to the previous year. Further, by 2025, cybercrime is likely to cost the world 10.5 trillion dollars annually. These frightening statistics point to one thing, the need to shore up and strengthen the security of software applications by leveraging test automation services. In fact, enterprises should integrate application security tools into the SDLC to conduct continuous security testing....

  The internet-based applications accessed through various device platforms have become extremely popular with users as they allow the latter to conduct myriad activities. As such applications offer unfettered access to users at large, they are susceptible to threats from hackers. In fact, hackers are always on the lookout to gain access to such applications to steal confidential data. And since software security testing doesn’t always receive the focus it deserves, any potential vulnerability in the application can remain undetected. According to Statista, threat vectors such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, malicious file upload, executable code injection, and file path traversal, among others, are increasingly being used by hackers. An application security testing exercise aims to prevent any unauthorized access to data and its destruction. To begin with, it allows data privacy for the respective users while protecting data from other unauthorized ones. The critical areas...

  The healthcare ecosystem is greatly benefited by the medical device industry for providing innovative solutions and improving treatment outcomes. And since these devices play a critical role in saving human lives, their quality is of paramount importance. Hence, manufacturers must conduct stringent medical device testing to ensure the delivery of effective and safe healthcare services. The focus should be on implementing a robust medical device testing strategy and ensuring the quality, effectiveness, safety, and reliability of such devices. Given the critical role of such devices, these are subjected to compliance from multiple regulatory bodies. At the same time, users of such devices expect them to perform exceptionally well in terms of accuracy, safety, usability, efficiency, and functionality. So, manufacturers are driven to adopt a comprehensive and effective medical device testing approach right from the concept and design stage to production. To cite an example, the manu...

  The fast-changing domain of digital technology needs new software applications to meet an ever-increasing demand. However, the growing complexity and cost of such applications, changing customer preferences, and the advent of new technologies have created a cocktail of challenges. These include developing quality software applications and delivering them faster to the market. Moreover, the software applications need to be updated periodically in accordance with market requirements. To address these challenges, the software applications need to be tested alongside development using the agile software testing methodology. The methodology, besides identifying bugs in the software code quite early in the development cycle, provides flexibility, reliability, increased productivity, and cost-efficiency.  In traditional testing, there is often a lack of communication between the developers and testers thanks to their silo-based working approach. And to add to their woes are challe...

  Digital technologies have transformed the way we interact, conduct business, work remotely, study, hire services, pay utility bills, enable medical consultation, and many more. The World Wide Web has truly bound the world to an invisible string that cuts across geographies, industries, cultures, languages, geopolitics, and others. The transformation seeks to influence customer experience, time-to-market, competition, and costs for entities in a positive way. However, with the expanding sphere of digitization, customers benefiting from rising competition have become choosy about better quality products or services. This has put increased pressure on organizations to provide digital assurance for their products or services and, in the process, deliver outcomes such as better functionality, performance, security, and usability. Digital assurance solutions  comprising testing tools, reusable test assets, accelerators, and domain expertise ensure software products to be of top-no...

  In the highly competitive digital world driven by technology, businesses need to rethink the way they operate, make decisions, predict future scenarios, increase productivity, and innovate. The need of the hour for them is to re-imagine processes and accelerate digital transformation by leveraging intelligent process automation (IPA). If digital transformation is about delivering value to customers quickly by optimizing business processes using digital technology, intelligent automation goes a step further. As legacy systems hinder the progress of achieving digital transformation holistically, businesses need an easily configured platform to deliver solutions. Enterprise service automation working in conjunction with legacy systems can act as a source for deriving intelligent insights into processes.  Furthermore, when businesses have implemented lean methodologies to improve customer satisfaction, employee engagement, productivity, and cost-efficiency, they do not appear t...

  The BFSI sector thrives on trust and ensuring the same is not easy. Banks invest heavily to enforce security for the financial assets of their customers, be it using reinforced steel vaults to leveraging advanced intrusion prevention systems. To ensure the security and privacy of assets banks should have foolproof methods to authenticate identities. Any failure to do so could result in heists from criminals. This is where security testing in banking/financial services becomes critical to not only sustain but become competitive as well. In an ecosystem where criminals have access to similar computing power and resources as institutions belonging to the BFSI sector, creating a new security model has become a challenge. The BFSI sector does not have to worry about daylight robberies in today’s day and age but must counter increasing threats from cybercriminals who have no qualms in using advanced technology tools.  According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime is going to exa...

  Today’s customers look for software applications that are aesthetically appealing, rich in content, safe, and capable of working seamlessly across devices. In short, they want the applications to provide a great user experience. Organizations have realized the critical role of user experience in the success of their applications. Hence, they are focusing on performance testing to ensure the scalability, reliability, efficiency, and responsiveness of the applications. Importantly, it is only by implementing a robust performance testing strategy that your software application can handle a situation where more users use the application seamlessly at the same time. This becomes evident during big sales days like Black Friday. It has been observed that many eCommerce sites/apps face outages when thousands of shoppers visit them at the same time. Outages in the form of latency or downtime can cause user frustration and drive them to competitors. Thus, the non-performance of your we...

  Organizations developing software to reach out to their target customers are always in a hurry to deliver at a faster pace. In doing so, they often cut corners with quality testing and end up delivering a product that leaves a lot to be desired. With new development paradigms like Agile-DevOps, organizations have renewed their focus on performing quality testing to ensure the reliability, scalability, usability, functionality, security, and performance of the software application. And among the above-mentioned tests, functional testing takes the cake for verifying whether the application works as it was intended to, as per the client’s mandate/users’ requirements. Furthermore, since these tests can be pretty exhaustive and time-consuming, organizations employ automated functional testing in their value chain.   What is functional testing? Functional testing ensures the performance of the application as per the functional requirements that are to be met. Here, the focus ...