Author: Yogesh Kumar Gupta

All clients do have a foremost and pertinent question- How soon can Crestech start the partnership journey?

We at Crestech have developed an environment to move fast and start the journey as soon as the next day. Our multiple departments work in sync and in parallel to fast-track the alignment of the right people for your testing needs.

We constantly deliver on our promises by offering experts, who are adept in their respective domain and are not learning at the cost of the Client, reacting beforehand to the foreseen or expected roadblocks in the journey ahead.

Legal Formalities

We understand that when our client is ready to take the next step, the legal formalities for initiating the Project has to be completed to the satisfaction of the client and full compliance to the law of the land.

The processes & resources at Crestech have gone through this journey multiple times and we quickly and mostly without any issues/concerns, get these in place immediately by aligning with our client’s legal terms. This journey is initiated beforehand so as to ensure that the Client’s requirements and Crestech obligations are expressed unambiguously and fulfilled at the earliest.

Project Initiation

Project journey initiation at Crestech is from the very first step when the client contacts us. While the client is still discussing the details of the engagement, we, working in the background, are silently planning and identifying the processes & resources and their scheduling, acquiring the project management infrastructure so that the Project is completed expeditiously to the satisfaction of the client. Crestech strongly values creating stakeholder alignment so as to successfully deliver the Project within the deadline.

Core Team on Boarding and Kickoff

While the legal formalities are being taken care, we are already working on onboarding the core team for detailed understanding on the requirements of the client and allocating different milestones to the core team so that by the time Kickoff happens we are already are deeply involved in the Project. The core team will expend resources and time creating stakeholder alignment. Core team typically begins with the identification of the team members and ensuring that the project team has sufficient information to begin developing a detailed roadmap, schedule and a detailed budget for efficient tracking

Scaling Up and Down

The knowledge, skills, and experience needed on the project varies at each stage.

With an effective demand management framework which predicts the skill and volume requirements based of the long and short term testing strategies, we are able to scale up or down dynamically.

We make sure we are fully aware of the Project dynamics all the time hence ensuring resources allocation/ ramp down well in time.

At Crestech, all departments work in collaboration to ensure that our client’s requirements are clearly understood and the understanding disseminated to all concerned resources while simultaneously on-boarding and aligning them. Our speedy response ensures that the client’s internal processes such as vendor on-boarding, project initiation etc. never waits for inputs from Crestech. We make sure that the ball is never in our court for longer than a few hours.

Here are the 3 essential ways a testing team contributes.

A tester’s role in the development of software has always been well established. But their pivotal and much bigger role as team integrators often goes unnoticed. In fact, the tester has to play multiple roles which are much wider than the on-ground testing to ensure that the product meets the satisfaction of clients, and a synergy is maintained within the team on “what client wants”.

The testers are the advocate of the Product Owner, liaison of the development team, and share the vision of the business team whilst understanding the technical hiccups of the development team.

Hence they are the best people to ensure that technology is able to meet the required functionality by addressing issues related to people, processes and tools.

To ensure that the Integrated QA works well, there are 3 essential points where your QA teams need to integrate well.

The 3 important roles played by QA teams

As A Bridge between BAs and Developers

QA team has the unique advantage of being at the cusp of technology and business. Although it is the role of the BAs to translate the business team’s needs to technical specifications for the developer team, the QA team can support them by bridging the communication gap between the BAs and the developers and bringing everyone to a common understanding of the requirement. Eg. When is considered to be done? What is its acceptable way of working and filling any gaps in the user stories which might leave room for misinterpretations technically?

Below are some ways this can be achieved i.e when the QA Team plays an important role in the following:

• Defining the Definition of Done: The Definition of Done (DoD) will include the criteria and conditions that a software feature has to meet so that it is acceptable to the consumer. When the feature reaches that stage of ‘quality’, it would mean that it can be released without further development or testing. QA testers understand the DoD from the BA, help developers to understand and assess it as feature details, and finally ensure during testing that the DoD is satisfactorily met.

• Setting the Acceptance Criteria: Setting Acceptance criteria would mean setting the lowest level of functional as well as non-functional requirements. They are the unique conditions that the software product must meet for each user story. They are the definition of acceptable feature behaviour from the business, customer or user perspective. QA Testers have an understanding of this perspective and while testing the product they ensure that the acceptance criteria are met. 

• Determine the Definition of Ready: As QA Testers have an understanding of business needs better than the developers, they are in a position to determine if the product is complete and ready for testing. As the bridge between the BA and the developers, even before the testing is started, they ensure that the functionalities required are met. Only when they feel that the product is done and ready for testing is it when they start their testing process. 

Guard Quality: Play End User’s Representatives

The most overlooked features of the software product may actually be the defining factor of user experience!

QA Tester plays the role of the representative of the end user and understands what is important for the customer and thus avoids the above from happening. Users do not care about how many rounds of testing have been run on the software product, they only care about the product experience they get. Few things the QA testers do to ensure alignment with end customers include –

• Understanding real-time scenarios that customer is likely to face to comprehend the user behaviour and implementing testing as per that.
• Adopt the perspective of the end user to understand what can lead to their satisfaction by attempting to explore situations where users are prone to face errors. This will help in effective error identification.
• Walk in the shoes of the customer to come across the real “environments” of the end user under which the application might be used and test the software product accordingly.

SME on the Product & its Functionality

Great QA Testers evolve into being the one-stop shop for every functional knowledge about the product:

• How the product works,
• Each business rule and the probable impact of making any change to it,
• Each repeated issue and its history.
• Which build caused chaos after release and why vs which had the highest quality index?

The key difference between a good tester and a great tester is “ownership”. And hence, the tester who owns the quality of the product tends to dig deep and attain extensive knowledge about the product and its lifecycle. This gives them the unique role of being an Advisor to the Product Owner/ Manager or the knowledge SME whenever needed.

Now let’s look at some best Ways a tester can ensure that they are able to integrate this well:

• Have Consistent Communication with all stakeholders to ensure that all the teams have a clear idea of the expectations and the business expectations are correctly and completely translated into technical requirements. Gap Analysis, Static Testing and establishing RTMs are some great tools to do this.
• Ensure that the BA/ Product Owner, the testers and the developers are aligned with the priorities at all times. This can be established by regular discussions on bottlenecks and status. The teams can also meet periodically for further planning, clarification and discussion of stories to help the m be on track.
• Knowledge exchange between the teams is also vital between teams. There are several ways of doing this such as project artefacts, periodic sessions and more.

Conclusion

The need of the hour is Integrated QA. Successful integration can only happen if the QA testers play the 3 crucial roles that they are supposed to play in this integration and perform their best in their role to create a high-quality product that will match the requirement of the customer, leading to satisfaction.

Read also Knowledge Management and QA.

5 Ways to track quality and trust the delivery

Your relationship with your Quality Partner will only meet with success if you are able to trust their delivery. This is especially true in the current era where quality is at the core of how your customers will perceive your product. When you hire a partner to gatekeep quality of your product, you will not only expect them to take care of the basic responsibilities but also look for a defined level of commitment which allows you to put your trust in them.

So, how do you establish that your Quality Partner is trustworthy?

As a customer, you would like to get the maximum success of your product and would look for a partner who will help you achieve this. So a partner should give you more for your buck. They should give you valuable suggestions and feedback. They should be sensitive to your timelines, budgetary requirements and goals. And most importantly should have an open line of communication with your company.

Mentioned below are 5 ways in which you can measure the above key factors of partnership.

1. Understanding your end objectives and being able to translate them to measurable success criteria

Needless to say, when you partner with any company, you will have an end goal in your mind. It is crucial for your partner to be able to understand the goal and be able to list out the objectives which need to be achieved to optimize your product’s chances of success.

A few basic parameters which they will need to focus on are:

• Defining the short term, as well as the long term goal. E.g: Increase automation coverage/ Faster roll outs/ Reduction in production leakages.

• What will make this engagement a success? At least 80% automation coverage/ 40% reduction in time to market etc.

• Key challenges in achieving the short term and long term goals and mitigation plans.

• And adherence to timeline and budget.

Once they understand the above, then the partner can craft a solution catered to your needs specifically and translate the objectives into measurable success criteria to be able to monitor, evaluate, and optimize delivery performance. E.g: Understanding that poor end user experience due to deteriorating quality of shipped builds is caused by inadequate device coverage or lesser than optimal regression coverage etc.

2. Establishing metrics and tracking work against the success criteria of the product and project

Depending on your specific product and engagement type, you will want to set some metrics that will help in measuring success criteria. Some of the type of metrics which you may want to monitor includes:

Focused on Product Health

Focused on Engagement Health

• Scope and Time Variance
• Test Coverage Per Release/ Sprint
• Defect Relevance Per Release/Sprint
• Total Cost of Testing/ ‘defined period’
• Time to Market Reduction etc.

3. Agreeing on an initial Service Level Baseline

While defining the metrics is of paramount importance, it is also essential to set a value for the corresponding indicators and know if the desired state of health is being achieved or not. This can only begin if we establish the baseline values. To be able to do so, an initial baseline Service Level Agreement (SLA) is agreed upon.

A Baseline Service Level Agreement will let you specify the delivery objectives in relation to historical measurement data available or establish new ones in collaboration with your Quality partner.

E.g. : Forward requirement traceability is at 90% currently (baselined) and desired state is 100%.

4. Optimize on SLAs continuously

While a partner may perform well against the baseline a partner should look at improving and optimizing the SLAs continuously. A Quality Partner should review an SLA and include changes that can result in improving desired objectives. This is essential to be able to meet service level targets and avoid non-compliance with SLA. The IDEAL model defined below can be used then for implementing the process improvement:

I: Initiating the implementation process

D: Diagnosing what it is currently

E: Establishing a new plan for testing

A: Acting on implementing the plan

L: Learning from the process improvements implemented

5. Ensure the “Total Cost of Testing” is reduced while optimizing.

During the optimization process, an important aspect that can be looked into is reducing the total cost of testing. The cost and time associated with QA software testing services are very valuable and hence it is important to figure out ways of optimizing software testing to reduce cost. There are several ways by which this can be achieved such as:

• Detecting bugs as early as possible to minimize defect leakage reduces fix and remediation costs.
• Automate testing wherever it is possible.
• Effective utilization of tools.
• Simplifying Test Reports.
• Continuous integration by all stakeholders on a daily basis can help in the early detection of defects.
• Setting and measuring metrics that measure quality deliverance.

Conclusion

A trustworthy partner goes along on the journey of building a great product with you and proves their intent time and again. This partner has a clear understanding of expectations, is committed to certain delivery standards and is completely transparent in their delivery.

With the upsurge in the adoption of technology in various business environments and organizations increasing reliance on software applications for core operational transactions, the need for fast, reliable and stable performing applications has become an absolute necessity.

The possible drawbacks on an organization’s business due to performance issues are revenue loss, poor end-user satisfaction, high maintenance cost and increased cost to scale up.

There is an increasing demand from customers for fast and reliable applications not only to meet their growing business needs, but also to gain a competitive edge in the market.

Software load testing is the discipline concerned with designing and executing non-functional tests to know the current performance of an application vis-à-vis the speed, scalability, stability, and other performance parameters.

Load testing is apt for software solution providers as a diagnostic tool to locate bottlenecks and performance issues within an application.

In Load testing we endeavor to question ourselves the following and address the same by evolving an effective testing methodology.

• Whether the application meets the defined response time requirements of my customers?
• Will my users experience acceptable response times even during peak hours?
• What system capacity is required to handle expected load?
• Where are the bottlenecks in my multi-user environment?
• How can we detect defects that only occur under real-load conditions?
• How can we optimize the multi-user application before it goes live?

What is Load Testing?

Load Testing is a testing process that determines how software applications affect the user experience when they are used simultaneously by many users. With application load testing, we will be evaluating the system behavior/degradation with various loads and/or configurations to ensure:

a) that the system meets the performance requirements as defined,
b) determine the capacity of existing systems and
c) create benchmarks for future systems.

Why is Load Testing important?

Load testing service is important because sometimes popular sites often suffer from outages when they draw unforeseen traffic on their pages. To avoid such outages, via the various tools we use, we ensure glitch free usage of an application.

What is the process involved in Load Testing?

To ensure that the load testing is conducted in a systematic, well documented with timelines, the following process is adopted:

• Evaluate requirements and identify scenarios
• Develop load test scripts by emulating end user actions
• Automate and Execute the test scripts with different volume of data and concurrent users
• Monitor the tests with automation
• Analyze results and verify across the SLAs
• Craft load test report

What is performance benchmarking and baselining?

• Benchmarking:
  A set standard that helps to determine the quality of the performance of the product. We establish high-quality metrics of an application to meet various business standards.

• Baselining:
  To compare the performance of a new application with a known standard of system performance. We ensure that the application doesn’t degrade with any new updates over time.

Performance testing helps assess your application through the speed, effectiveness, scalability and reliability.

What are some important metrics captured during load testing?

There are curated metrics that are captured while performing load testing. These metrics are captured by analyzing products.

• Response time
• Transactions per second
• Hits per second
• Throughput
• CPU utilization
• Memory usage
• Network load

What are the popular testing tools used in performance testing?

• Jmeter:
  An open-source tool to test load and measure performance by simulating heavy loads. Mainly used for testing web applications.

• LoadRunner:
  An automated load testing tool which can create virtual users and scale up the capacity of the virtual users, identify processes having trouble and diagnose a problem to find out the root cause.

• Neoload:
  It is a proprietary automating tool used for performance testing on web and mobile applications.

• Silk Performer:
  Load and Performance testing tool for Java and .Net applications.

• Rational Performance Tester:
  An automated testing tool for performance testing from IBM.

When is the right time to get load testing done?

When the application is relatively stable and before rolling it out to production would be the right time to get load testing done for your application. Also, load testing should be done at an early stage to assure performance consistency across user loads, to ensure speed and scalability with current infrastructure and for continuous stable performance.

• About EdTech
• Collaborate to bring efficiency
• Collaborative platforms
• Collaborate for Learning / Peer Learning
• Collaborate for building content / Co-authoring
• Collaborate Content and Actors
• Conclusion

About EdTech

Simply, EdTech is a combination of hardware, software and educational content to enhance, engage the learning of an individual. It is a practice of introducing digital tools into classrooms, home or anywhere to create a fun learning experience.

We all know that the pandemic has led to a drastic transformation across all sectors and industries globally, and most crucially Education. Over a period, classrooms have moved beyond books and pens to tech infused devices, interactive online courses or even a bot that can take notes and record lectures for students who can’t make it for their classes. We noticed that the need for technology in the education sector has never been more pronounced. Post Covid, EdTech will likely continue to remain relevant along with traditional ways of learning. EdTech highlights the importance of collaboration to learners and content creators. Working or learning together can make the process faster, easier and efficient. Let’s understand how.

Collaborate to bring efficiency:

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”.

Collaborative learning describes a fun learning environment where a group of learners of mixed abilities interact with one another to complete a common task, which leads to achieving fruitful success. It is believed that educational experiences that are active, social, contextual, engaging and learner-owned lead to deeper learning. Similarly, the content creation can also be enriched with collaboration, bringing different dimensions from contributors. Let’s discover some of these platforms that can enable collaboration.

Collaborative platforms

Collaborative platforms have become a hot topic among modern business, colleges and universities as well as elementary schools. These platforms can increase team’s productivity as they allow them to share information, files, and documents and help them communicate  faster.

During the pandemic many educational systems have realized the usefulness of remote learning. Collaboration platforms not only eradicate the need for physical meeting of students and teachers, they also improvise on the speed of content sharing and exchanging of ideas. Collaborative learning tools support the innate needs of students getting feedback regarding their progress and having their questions answered by their teachers or by their peers. Few examples of Collaboration tool that can help teachers and students interact efficiently are:

• Padlet
• Whiteboard
• MS word
• Skype
• Zoom
• GoSoapBox
• Piktochart

Learning or content development with peers will enhance the experience and content.

Collaborate for Learning / Peer Learning

Peer learning is a process where one learner engages with other learners to build an understanding on a content. Peer-to-peer learning is an effective method of knowledge transfer and a cost-effective method of training and development.

Similarly, during the content creation process, reviews done by the co-author or peers is termed as peer review. This has the power to add-up any missing dimensions in the content. The outcome of the peer review will be a better version, which can be understood better. All the above is possible if the collaborative platform has a concept of co-authoring in it.

Collaborate for building content / Co-authoring: When multiple authors can work or edit a single document and collaborate concurrently in real-time without interfering with each other’s changes, that’s called co-authoring. It removes barriers to server-based / version controlling collaboration. This feature helps schools, universities, and organizations to avoid unintentional multiple versions of documents by reducing the need to share attachments.

Collaborate Content and Actors:

For any EdTech it is important to have a content rich repository that can be organized into different segments. This categorization into segments increases the reusability of the content and helps in the upgradation of the content. Actors or users on the repository should be regulated so that any content mishandling can be prevented. Workflow can be defined for adding, updating, and deleting content from the repository that can pass through multiple levels, to avoid any misses or deliberate act of disruption.

Conclusion:

Aforesaid content describes most common enablers of EdTech, however there can be more based on the need of solution and audience. In the coming years collaborative learning and working will emerge as a distinct competitive advantage and skill. EdTech is going to play a major role to the masses and corporations by providing required information and collaboration.  Businesses or schools that adapt these tools and techniques and actively work to uplift collaboration as an essential skill will be the leaders. Alone we can do so little, and together, we can do so much. – Hellen Keller