The influence of software is getting very important as we are moving to a more digitally embedded world. Global companies are investing a lot of money in developing quality software products. However, companies need to test their software effectively to ensure the best quality. Testing software is a time-consuming process in the development cycle and is a challenge faced by many enterprises worldwide. Accelerating the testing cycle is a focus area for most software enterprises.

Moreover, with high customer demand for new features, most digital platforms today have to follow a continuous release model. To ensure the high quality of digital services, an accelerated QA is required, which can quickly identify performance regression and UX issues for each build before release. Continuously evolving infrastructure (cloud, network edge, OS, and devices) further convolute continuous testing challenges. Thus, companies are looking for new testing methodologies and tools to ensure speed and quality while adding new features to existing software or developing new software.

This article discusses the top 10 ways to accelerate the software testing cycle.

How to Speed Up the Testing Cycle and Maintain Quality?

As users don’t like to wait for upgrades, fixes, or new features, testing cycles are growing immensely shorter. Organizations can employ some of the following tactics that speed up software tests to stay competitive in the challenging business environment. Let’s look at the top 10 ways to accelerate software release cycles and maintain quality.

Optimize the CI/CD Pipeline
Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) are mainly used to push code changes to software development as quickly as possible. This method will help testers to reduce the mean time to resolution, identify errors in code integration and ensure that essential fixes reach customers quickly. With the optimization of the CI/CD pipeline, testers can have better control over the QA process. Also, they can respond more quickly to market demands by rapidly bringing up new environments and testing against them. Overall, this will help testers to reduce the time required to test software.
With HeadSpin’s CI/CD integration capabilities, QA teams can automatically check new builds, run tests quickly, and provide actionable insights into the performance of apps. Also, with the HeadSpin Platform, testers can integrate QA tools, such as test suite management, CI/CD orchestration, automation frameworks, test device infrastructure management, test data analysis, and defect management tools, to achieve a higher degree of automation for end-to-end QA processes.

‍Start Tracking Bugs Early
When testers start bug tracking early and do it effectively in the development cycle, they can fix errors as soon as they are identified. If this is done correctly, software-developing teams don’t need to deal with an extensive list of errors that need to be fixed. With early bug tracking, the testing teams can save significant time during software testing and accelerate the overall testing process.
HeadSpin’s synthetic monitoring capability can help enterprises identify issues proactively and fix them before they become pervasive. HeadSpin also offers AI/ML-based analysis of the test data for quicker insights into the performance of apps. Using these features of HeadSpin’s AI-based platform, testing teams can effectively reduce the time required to complete a testing cycle.

Implement Parallel Testing
Instead of executing each test one after the other, performing more than one test together can help testers finish the testing process faster. This type of testing is called parallel testing, and it can be performed with multiple device-browser-OS combinations to test the cross-browser and cross-platform functionality. With parallel testing, testing teams can reduce the time required to perform test suites, thus allowing for faster testing cycles.
With the support of HeadSpin’s real device cloud, testers can perform various tests on their applications at the same time. With the HeadSpin Platform, testing teams can execute parallel tests of their apps with multiple device-browser-OS combinations and get actionable insights to enhance app performance.

Get the Testing Process Organized
The most crucial step to speed up the testing process is to stay organized while performing the testing of software. Most testers consider organizing test cases as their last priority in the testing cycle. However, using good test management techniques, maintaining accurate data, and keeping clean automation reports can save a lot of time and make the testing cycle much smoother. By keeping the testing process organized, testers can repeat the test cycles quickly if a re-run of test cases is required.
HeadSpin’s customizable data visualization dashboard helps testers easily organize the data collected across various test sessions and compare experience and performance insights from the test data.

Balance Manual and Automation Testing
As release time is an important factor in the test cycle, testers tend to focus more on automation testing than manual testing. However, automation testing is not an alternative to manual testing. Only with manual testing can testers understand the user’s perspective and identify errors before the software is released. Testers anticipate the actions of software users to create an experience they value with manual testing. So, it is really crucial for testing teams to balance automation testing and manual testing to accelerate the testing cycle while maintaining quality.

‍Reduce Flakiness in the QA Process
As we know, automation tools are helpful for accelerating the testing cycle. However, these tools can show false positives, which may lead to flakiness. Flakiness while software testing can increase the time required for completing an entire testing cycle. So, it is best to identify and fix the problem earlier by isolating flaky tests from the software build. With the reduction of flakiness in the QA process, testers can speed up the software testing cycle without any delays.

Test on Real Devices
Real-device testing can help the testing teams understand the problems customers face using the software in real-world circumstances. If functional testing is done on real devices, it eliminates redundancies in the QA process and enables QA teams to capture functional and functional-performance data without the need to run repeated tests. With this type of testing, testers can fix such issues prior to the release of the software. This will help enterprises to reduce the time spent on testing after the product release and even accelerate the software updates.

With HeadSpin’s global device infrastructure, QA teams can test applications from various geographies and access thousands of real mobile and media devices. HeadSpin enables organizations to execute app testing on real devices in 90+ locations remotely.

‍Use Container Approach to Get Fast Feedback
Nowadays, organizations use various tools to perform different functions while testing software. This may lead to confusion among testers and delays in the testing process. Testers need to use the container approach, where they can separate various methods by creating different projects using different programming languages or frameworks, to avoid unnecessary delays in the software testing cycle.

Implement Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is a method of performing automation testing at regular intervals whenever the developer updates the code. With continuous testing, testers can get quick feedback, identify issues faster, and resolve errors effectively. To perform effective continuous testing, testing teams must regularly update their testing environment. Continuous testing can not only reduce the time required for testing but also improve the quality of software at all stages of development.
With the HeadSpin Platform, enterprises can implement continuous testing in their QA process. HeadSpin enables automation testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery, which are the key components of continuous testing, to accelerate the testing of applications.

‍Keep Communication Transparent
While working as a team, it is important to have transparent communication among the team members. If every member of the team is aware of the status of the testing performed, it will help the entire team to accelerate the testing process without any confusion. The communication between the QA and development teams should be spot on, as this can help developers resolve the errors identified by QA experts on a timely basis. With effective communication among all team members, enterprises can speed up the software testing cycle while maintaining good quality.

Read: AI's Role in Enhancing Software Quality Through Regression Testing

How Does HeadSpin Help Global Organizations Accelerate the Software Testing Cycle?

With the HeadSpin Platform, organizations can collaborate seamlessly to accelerate the software testing cycle with intelligent automation and data science insights. Below are some examples of how HeadSpin helped companies worldwide speed up their testing cycle.

Example 1
One of the most admired peer-to-peer hospitality companies in the world was in search of a tool to assist them in developing a native app and performing testing of the app’s features and functionality as quickly as possible. With the HeadSpin Platform, the company was able to perform automated and manual functional testing of its app on Android, iOS, and mobile web. HeadSpin helped the company to test its app’s new features and functionality faster.

Example 2
An American multinational mass media factual television company based in New York City was looking for a testing solution to speed up the evaluation of its streaming KPIs across various platforms like mobile devices, streaming devices, and smart TVs. The HeadSpin Platform enabled the company to analyze streaming KPIs for different platforms. With the HeadSpin Platform, the company was also able to automate critical user journeys, thus, speeding up the entire testing cycle.

Example 3
A business analytics segment of a leading US multinational technology company wanted to reduce the time to market for its new feature release and fix data latency issues in its newly deployed architecture. HeadSpin helped the company to perform 10,000 end-to-end test cases covering all user scenarios with its Platform. With HeadSpin’s Regression Intelligence, the company gained the ability to judge a build as pass or fail without any human intervention. Thus, the company was able to reduce the time to market for its new feature release by 75% and fix all issues due to data latency using the HeadSpin Platform.

Conclusion

Global organizations have started investing significantly to optimize and accelerate their testing processes to ensure the continuous release of high-quality software. Accelerating the software testing cycle will help companies to reduce the time-to-market of their products and new features. By efficiently applying the tips mentioned in this blog, you can balance the speed and quality required in the testing process.

The HeadSpin Platform is used in various industries, like BFSI, telecom, gaming, retail, and media, to speed up the entire testing cycle with its test automation and data science capabilities. HeadSpin, the best tool to accelerate software testing, has been helping organizations worldwide to improve their test coverage by up to 30%, reduce time spent on QA for new releases by 60%, and execute tests 15% faster.

Article resource: This article was originally published on https://www.headspin.io/blog/accelerate-testing-cycle-automation-testing