• Read more about How Automated Testing Is Saving QA Jobs

A couple of days ago I was raving to a QA tester about one of our automated browser testing initiatives at Mobomo and how it could greatly benefit the quality assurance field as a whole as well as free up time for our manual testers. I was surprised to get a response along the lines of, “Yeah…  so we can automate ourselves out of a job.”

Regrettably, there are hundreds if not thousands of jobs that are lost per year due to automation - leaving many people in a frantic to either start looking for a new job or even a career. Based off my time in the software industry I have found the opposite for QA Testers. In my defense, I delivered a handful of informal reasons on "how automated testing protects QA testers" to reassure us all that we won’t be out of a job (or career) anytime soon.

If your company is taking an initiative to implement automated testing, they will most likely seek to upgrade your skills:

Manual testers generally have the best overall view of functionality for an application. They know the areas that are most prone to breaking, understand the general flow of the application, and they work with all team members in order to ensure the application is in a production-ready state. A reliable company will see the value these individuals bring to the table and will find it worth seeking the people with the most hands-on experience to begin their automated testing initiative.

Develop more skills, putting you into higher demand:

My ability to think like a programmer has been the most lucrative skill I have obtained so far. The capability has instilled logic that has allowed me to have a more clear understanding of the world around me. I am able to make better decisions in life and take action sooner by simply understanding the philosophy behind programming and overcoming the fear of learning it. Besides, burning glass reports that 49% of all jobs paying $58,000 or more requires some form of coding skills… if that isn’t demand, then I don’t know what is.

Efficient testing leads to more productivity:

In the realm of automated testing everything is written in code, meaning that a computer will interpret a set of instructions in a static state that will be executed at the speed of light. Now the human brain is roughly 30 times faster than the best supercomputer, but the combination of neural activity with deciphering instructions and using motor skills to fulfill these instructions severely hinders your ability to be productive. Now that tests are being written in code, you can execute tests without being present, freeing up your time to assist coworkers or close out other issues.

Tests-as-Code:

This allows you to dot your i’s and cross your t’s - making you more valuable to coworkers.

Since code is static by nature, the tests you have created over time won’t change unless you manipulate your code. This innate ability allows you to scale a suite of tests covering the whole application without having to worry about writing them again unless your application changes to the point where some tests may not be the best fit. If this situation happens you may try and upgrade your suite of tests ensuring that your application stays stable on every code change.

Hopefully I have reassured some of you on automation in the QA world. I recommend learning how to use selenium -  a free open-source tool for automated browser testing. Another great source is YouTube, where you can essentially find anything and everything on automated testing if you search correctly.

Remember, automated testing is one of the greatest opportunities for a QA tester - it’ll save you time, increase your skill set, increase your test accuracy, and ultimately keep you moving forward in your career.

• Read more about Tips For Website QA

Website QA testing can be challenging. Let’s start off by answering what quality assurance (QA) testing is. When you develop a software product QA is a systematic process of checking to see whether a product or whatever you are trying to develop is meeting specified requirements. A vital part of any website project is the quality assurance stage. Prior to the launch, final QA testing ensures that your site is working according to your expectations and that your site users won’t be frustrated with any non-functioning pages. In fact many website and mobile application or software development companies have a team specifically devoted to QA.

Here are some tips that can help you make sure your site is ready to launch.

Know the Project:

Before you can represent the end-user and begin testing a website, you must know the project's background information. Find out who the target audience is and what primary goals they want to achieve from the website, if you don’t have this information it’s difficult to know how the user should expect to experience your site. It’s also important to familiarize yourself with the project’s scope requirements so you can ensure that everything has been delivered on-time and within the expectations of the client.

Stay Consistent:  

Always make sure that everything is consistent within a site.  Consistency is very important in graphic design and if you are not demonstrating consistency the website design could lose its meaning altogether. So unless a change is necessary it’s always best to try to convey information (e.g. highlighting a particular element or function) as planned by the design and development team. Some areas where consistency can sometimes be lost are in bullet points, images, shadows, borders, language, punctuation, and anything that is being used as pattern or functionality to provide positive user experience.

Take Your Time:

It’s important to make sure that you have patience and go through every last detail. If one person is performing QA on the site it's key to make sure you are being thorough and considering that you are one person looking at the product versus the millions of users that will look at it once you approve it to launch. Always think the biggest mistakes are those that are looked over by focusing on the small mistakes, ones that may not make an impact on user experience.

Consider International Users:

Everything is global, especially with all of the advancements in technology meaning, you should consider making your website to be able to use internationally. Two big considerations that you should consider are:

You always want your users to visit your website and have the best user experience possible, so be mindful to consider those who may not be in your timezone and make sure that everything can be easily accessible even if they are not in your time zone so that you have happy users.

When in doubt, CLICK!

Users will click on anything and everything on a site, it is important that while testing you make sure that everything that is supposed to be clickable is clickable and things that aren’t supposed to be clickable aren’t clickable.

Be Responsive:

Users will experience the site on every size, so that means while you QA you should test it on mobile, desktop and tablet. Images or text that fit in one screen may not look good on another screen size. Text can be orphaned, images cropped or reshaped in awkward ways, buttons or links may disappear altogether. Aside from images and text showing up differently- Unexpected things can happen with functionality. Functionality may not be able to hover over  to access to info or places. You can always use Google Analytics to decipher what your target audience uses most whether that be desktop, tablet or mobile device but moral of the story, the issues can be endless when making sure your website is responsive on each device so it’s always best to be thorough and test each device.

We would love to hear about other tips that you may use during your QA process!

• Read more about User-Centric Design for Federal Websites

For Federal Offices of Communication, the act—and art—of balancing websites that both cater to the public and promote the organizational structure and mission of the organization is always top of mind. Accordingly, those partnering with Federal offices must prioritize meeting both needs when designing and building agency sites. On numerous projects, our team has successfully managed to increase usability and deliver user-centric designs while simultaneously building sites that allow our Federal clients to bolster their brand. A sample of results for some clients:

-a swift 4% increase in first-time visitor overall satisfaction
-76% of all mobile users strongly agreeing that the new site made content easier to find
-88% of frequently visiting teens being satisfied with the new site

Below are some of the tools we’ve implemented to achieve success:

Navigation and Information Architecture

Treejack is a great usability testing tool that development teams can wield to test the information architecture and navigation of the site prior to even beginning a design. It is best used to test the findability of topics in a website using different navigational hierarchies. For one of our projects, both internal and external stakeholders were given 46 tasks to perform using a variety of different navigation hierarchies to find the most optimal site organization for both constituent groups.

Usability Testing

For usability testing, our team leverages both Loop11 and Usertesting.com. Using a live, interactive environment, both of these tools allow development teams to gain deep understanding of user behavior by observing users as they complete a series of tasks and questions on the site and/or mobile app in question. Interactions are captured and then analyzed in comprehensive reports. As an added bonus, Usertesting.com provides video footage of the interaction for review:

http://bit.ly/1rRvEAm

In summary, Federal websites and applications are often designed with too much emphasis on organizational hierarchy and goals, and too little focus on meeting end-users’ needs and expectations. User-Centric Design (UCD) tools can help government agencies buck this trend, however, allowing them to create websites and applications that engage users and maximize their interaction. Ultimately, this results in a sure win-win: Federal agencies’ constituents can experience an efficient, satisfying, and user-friendly design, and—with constituents’ increased engagement—organizations can ensure that their missions and information are communicated effectively. Act balanced.

• Read more about Grease for Squeaky Products - Tips from QA Land

As a QA Manager who often oversees more than a dozen projects at a time across both client/services and internal/product development I get an inside look at what helps projects succeed. Today I’m pulling my head out of the depths of QA Land to give you an important tip that’s been rattling around my brain cage for the last couple of weeks:

The squeaky wheel gets the grease

In other words, speak up. And keep speaking up until something is fixed.

Now I know that proverbs are silly to use since many of them are so contradictory: “good things come to those who wait”, right? Listen up folks — in the world of software development, good things do not come to those who wait. In fact, waiting around does absolutely nothing except tank your chances for successful delivery and implementation.

People have all different kinds of reasons for not speaking up: they’re too busy, they don’t want someone to think they’re complaining, they don’t want to feel like they’re a burden to the person who will have to make the fix, they don’t want to appear to be negative, etc.

Whether you’re a developer, a designer, or just someone who happens to be clicking around in an application it’s vital to speak up when you encounter things you aren’t expecting, or bugs, or undesired behavior from the application. The people that are working with the project are usually so deeply involved that it’s easy to miss surface-level mistakes that might seem so apparent to someone else. And if you don’t raise your voice about it, it might not ever get “greased”.

Here are some basic tips for “squeaking up” and getting heard:

Do:

• Contact someone on the project and politely let them know what sort of ugly bug you’ve uncovered.
• Be as specific as possible about the problem – give information about what browser (and version) you were using at the time, which OS, etc.
• Take a screenshot if possible and annotate it, conveying the issue as clearly as possible.
• Be proactive and create a ticket, including all of this helpful info about the bug in the ticket notes. This saves QA a step and ensures it gets (and stays) on their radar.
• If the issue isn’t resolved, be sure to follow up with someone about it (politely, of course).
• Explain the reasons you don’t agree with a certain type of functionality, citing helpful examples.

Don’t:

• Yell about the problem from across the room, which will inevitably make the QA and dev team feel like you’re making a long-ranged attack.
• Contact someone higher up in the chain than you need to – just report the issue to the person(s) that is working with the code daily and can help take care of the problem. Going above their head is an adversarial move.
• Get angry if people disagree with your insights about a type of functionality – maybe you don’t see the reason for it, but the dev team insists, even after open discussions about it, that that particular functionality has to remain as-is.

In short, your product won’t be a great product if it’s chock full of holes, nasty bugs, odd functionality, and so forth. It’s everyone’s job to report the wonky things they come across, even if you don’t want to “bother” people. You can be “squeaky” without be “squawky.”

• Read more about Introducing Socialspring: Business Software, Humanized

Introducing Socialspring - a suite of smart solutions for today's enterprise.

The Socialspring suite private beta launches today, along with its first application, Answers, and you can be the first in line to receive access; sign up now and you'll be the first to receive product announcements, details about release schedules, and you'll get the first opportunity to demo the applications in the suite.

A Fresh Idea

Socialspring is business software, humanized. The suite offers a complete set of tools for internal social collaboration, productivity, expert search and more. Unlike current social enterprise software, Socialspring is not just a dressed-up social network. We’ve re-imagined how business software can mimic real world social connections to help you be more productive and make work a more pleasurable experience overall. Socialspring apps will be united with single sign-on and although all of the apps can be used standalone, the more apps you use within the suite, the more powerful Socialspring becomes for your company.

Answers

Answers is the first application of the Socialspring suite; it's a Q&A platform for the enterprise that unites the collective knowledge of your organization. It captures workplace interactions, encourages participation with seamless integration of a badge and karma system, and promotes the sharing of knowledge among employees within your organization. It does all this (and more!) with a super user friendly interface, because we believe in creating software that is fun and easy to use.

Through participation, your employees will build a centralized (and searchable) knowledge repository. Answers puts the expertise of your entire company at your fingertips. Ask questions, get answers. Answer questions, get recognized.

Sneak Peek

Here is a shot of Socialspring Answers in action! Notice the Q&A functionality, the rating system, search capabilities, as well as the badge and karma points.

Why Answers?

In the modern world, companies are looking to consumer trends to determine their own enterprise strategies. Today's trend is knowledge and easy access to it. As a company grows in numbers and resources, relevant information is obfuscated through traditional means of communication - information is passed person-to-person through email, chat, or phone and then reaches a dead end. Answers allows that information to be captured, preserved and made available to anyone who might need it at the company.

Answers allows all that useful information in a company to be centralized, tagged, and saved for quick, easy access by anyone who needs it - today, tomorrow, or a year from now. Answers helps ease the process of getting new employees bootstrapped; it streamlines protocol for training and communication; it provides administration and other departments within your organization a way to make documents and information available to those that need it. Answers is the always growing, ever improving knowledge-base for your company.

Get On Board!

More information about Answers and Socialspring is coming, and it will go out first to those who sign up. Anticipate announcements regarding additional products in the Socialspring suite, including a core social network, internal link shortening, expert search and several more! So sign up now for the private beta, announcements and information about Socialspring - business software that treats you like a human being!

• Read more about Ninjas, Zombies, and Tips for QA in Agile Web Development

About a year after I started at Intridea I went to a QA conference in Las Vegas. Up to that point I had only really done QA in an agile web development environment, and I remember being absolutely floored when I took a mental survey of the people I had been attending talks with and realized the following: 1) Most of them were involved in only one project at their jobs; 2) Most of them had entire MONTHS for testing between new releases and deploys; and 3) Many of them either hated or feared the developers of the software they were testing. I was taken aback! “SAYWHAAAA?” I uttered dramatically.

If the thought of “agile development” incites images of developer-ninjas leaping through the office in stretchy black attire, and squashing codebugs with their killer ninja stars, you’re wrong. Well, 1/2 wrong. Really, it just means you work on a much faster paced development cycle, which requires ninja-like devs!

Instead of having 3 months between deploys, you might have one week or even just three days; and working for a web development team means you’re working with 5+ projects at a time on that super schedule instead of just one. It can get pretty hectic and overwhelming, and you never run out of things that need to be done. You need to be in tune with your inner ninja. Here are a few tips for ensuring quality in an Agile environment (and coming out with your psyche intact):

Create a Wiki or Knowledgebase

When you’re working on 5 projects, and each project has a staging server, a dev server, and a production server in addition to multiple logins for each server, you’re going to have a lot of credentials to remember. Add to that each nuance of procedure for each project and even if you can commit that many usernames, passwords and procedures to memory, odds are, someone on the team will forget.

One day I realized that I was spending quite a bit of my day going into my notepad, and copying over some URL or login or procedure detail that someone on the team had questions about. I’d say I spend 50% less of my day answering those questions now that we have a wiki with info on every project we work on! When someone asks a question that’s covered in the project’s wiki I refer them to the URL that won’t just give them the answer to that question, it’ll tell them everything they need to know for the project! When there’s a change I update the wiki instead of emailing the changes to everyone. Every time I have new info, they have new info.

This level of transparency ensures that people can easily reference information, and everyone is working from the same set of facts and assumptions.

Relax!! No one is out to get you.

I think that as a group, QA engineers are cynical and suspicious by nature. Unfortunately, I’ve seen that cynicism cross over into paranoia that a particular developer has it in for you. They’re OBVIOUSLY bouncing this ticket back and forth with you because they enjoy wasting your time and watching you squirm, AND they block you with 500 errors while you test. Sneaky sneaky developers. If you sometimes find yourself thinking along the same lines, just remember: they’re thinking the same thing. Odds are they’re also really frustrated about a bug that they think they’re solving and you think they aren’t.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that at the end of the day you’re both trying to do the same thing: deliver a quality product to the client. When you’re elbow deep in ticketing and regression testing it’s hard to keep perspective, but the developers want to deliver a product they’re proud of just as much as you do. You’re on the same team, and you should make an effort to keep that in mind.

Take time to organize

Sometimes the best thing you can do for the QA project is “go dark” and turn your computer off for a few. When I need a plan of action I like to get out a pad of paper and pen (or colorful markers) and make lists. Sure you can make lists with your computer ON, but it’s important to eliminate distractions and really focus on what needs to get done. Email, Present.ly, IM, and Campfire notices create a huge distraction for me, and I’ll find myself looking down at my list saying “now where was I?” four or five times before I’m done. When you have lots of projects that all need QA hours, taking 20 minutes to focus only on scheduling will ensure you don’t forget anything; more importantly, it’ll ensure that you have a realistic idea of what kind of hours you have over the next few days which helps to eliminate accidental over-scheduling (A QA Manager’s nemesis).

Take a break when necessary

Zombies are no good at QA and are usually being used for some evil purpose! (the dictionary said so.) Avoid zombiedom by taking breaks. If you feel your eyes start to cross, or your blood pressure start to change drastically, or if that odd tick in your eye-cheek area comes back, TAKE A BREAK!

Take 5 minutes to look out the window (the other glowing square in your room), or take 10 to walk around the building (hire a dog to chase you if you lack motivation), or get a snack and a drink (screw carrots we’re talking chocolate), but whatever you do, don’t work as a zombie. You’re not doing anyone any favors, and your refreshed mind will get more work done in 45 minutes than your zombie mind would have done in 2 hours.

Be nice!

We’ll still have our moments, and as much as we try to stay zen and draw patterns of peace in the sand, you’re probably going to reach a point that you’d rather be strangling someone than pretty much anything else. Instead of using your caps lock for evil and commenting “STILL NOT FIXED TOM. please reassign to me when it’s FIXED AND READY FOR VERIFICATION. (read: do your job)” why not be nice? Why not say “Hmm…This seems to be a tricky one. I did a cache clear, reboot, and tried on 3 different computers, but I get the same error every time. These are the steps I take:” and then re-list each step you take, re-word what you did before, but add any details you think might be helpful. Sometimes I offer to schedule a time to re-create the error at a time that the dev can watch the logs as it happens, because in the end we all want the same thing (remember: THEY’RE ON YOUR TEAM!).

The agile environment demands a lot from developers and the QA team. It requires that you come into the process with a clear and focused mind, ready for organized and productive pandemonium. Luckily, I’ve been able to identify some ways to target and enhance my inner ninja, and hopefully these tips can help you in your own agile processes!