“Testing just increases time and cost of delivery”- There is a surprisingly large no. of companies that believe this statement. In a drive to reduce testing costs businesses compromise the QA process by either not hiring testers or asking programmers to act as testers or use a crowd testing service. QA ensures that not only does the application perform optimally but also helps to manage maintenance costs by keeping them under control. Functional testing plays a crucial role in QA testing process.
Functional Testing tests the actual application performance in relation to users and the rest of the system. In order to keep testing costs under control the functional test automation tool needs to ensure a steady pace of delivery, support multiple browsers and devices and should allow operation across geographies. The main purpose behind load and performance testing is to measure the application characteristics and test its reliability. Hence, these tests have to be a continuous process and should not be kept until the end of the development lifecycle. Performance tests should ideally be run every day and should go beyond the defined user load to test the stability and performance of the application.
Cloud based load testing allows large scale tests, allow testing for the entire delivery chain and can be infinitely scalable. So what can companies do in order to maintain application standards and performances without compromising their budgets? The answer lies in automation. In order to maintain quality it is also essential to automate the lab to production as closely as possible. Using application release automation (ARA) tools helps to improve communication between teams, reduce time to market and facilitate agile development. By having a through test automation system in place businesses not only reduce risks and catch bugs in time but also facilitate agile development and exercise control over the delivery and deployment process.