Learning Zone

Do you know the economic impacts of bugs in your company? Did you know that an hour of downtime due to a bug could cost in excess of $1-$5 million for enterprises or more than $300,000 for SMB's?

Building an app is incredibly hard. Building an app that people love, use a ton and helps grow your company is even harder. Getting close to the perfect app can take some doing. While you may just want to sit down, build an app and hope for the best, you have to invest some time in strategy in order to get it right.

The day started out just like any other day except for one major problem - the office coffee maker broke. For anyone who spends even a small amount of time working in a high-performance environment, you'll immediately understand the critical importance this holds.

Towards the end of last quarter (Q2 2017) we realised that at the heart of our business is a massive and growing dataset. It was like finding a cave that you think could be a goldmine but you need to do a bit of digging first before you can be sure.

Recently, I spent the day at a local amusement/theme park with my family. One of the things that immediately struck me, aside from how much fun we had (more on that later) was how little effort had gone into exploratory testing at the park. Now they probably don't call it exploratory testing at theme parks they probably phrase it as mystery shopping or something similar but it isn't quite accurate. You see there is a big difference between experiencing the theme park as a user and testing the theme park. Much like app and website testing, the nuances are quite clearly delineated. Essentially, it boils down to not knowing what you don't know.

When you’re a manufacturing engineer (I was) working in the software development world (I am), you try to draw similarities between what you currently do and what you previously did.

Can you QA everything? This sounds like a pretty loaded question at the outset but what we’re asking is can you ensure the complete quality of your app or website? This question should really be focused on whether you need to QA everything in your organisation, which in turn fundamentally depends on your wider product strategy and your capacity for QA.

It’s been well-documented over the years how costly manufacturing defects to production lines spanning across a range of different industries.  According to the Cost of Quality (COQ) from the American Society of Quality (ASQ):

Anyone who has read any of the work we’ve released here on the Global App Testing blog or read our white paper will know that we feel strongly about the future of QA. To add to that, we also feel that the future of QA is deeply rooted in being able to test at the speed that release demands. In the world of ever increasing product releases and development, how do you ensure that your QA is adjusted properly? Can your testing program really keep up with continuous integration or/and agile approaches to development? Unfortunately, for most organisations and approaches to QA from the past, the answer is no. It doesn’t mean that exploratory QA is dead and it also doesn’t mean that automation or machine learning is the only answer.

One of the things that initially attracted me to working at Global App Testing and moving approximately 4,800 miles from Seattle to London was a set of cultural values. It seems trite in today’s business world that someone would decide to join a company based on their values since, based on what most people write, it appears cultural values are simply vapourware buzzwords. And, to be completely honest, it was what I was initially expecting when they were introduced during the interview process. However, I soon learned that these weren’t merely nice things that we say to get people hooked into working here – they are practised every single day.