When you’re 100% focused on launching a new app, website or email marketing campaign, it’s easy to let small, unnoticeable bugs slip by.
After all, you know your way around your app well and rarely, if ever, run into them. Plus, they aren’t that big of a deal, are they? You can always deal with them after you launch, and doing QA testing now will just eat up even more of your project’s budget.
Does the above situation sound familiar? Whether you’ve carried out QA tests before or not, it’s easy to overlook the importance of QA testing when you’re busy focusing on preparing your app or website for launch.
It’s also easy to fall into the trap of thinking of QA testing as just another cost, or assuming that a few automated tests are all it takes to make sure your application is bug free. There are many myths about QA testing – myths that all too unfortunately persist despite not being true.
Below, we’ve listed five common myths about QA testing that hold back projects, lead to serious post-release costs and annoy end users. If you’re in the process of launching a new mobile app, website, email campaign or landing page, make sure you aren’t falling victim to any of them.
QA testing is just another unnecessary cost that’s best avoided
When your project is near or over budget, it’s easy to look at QA testing as another cost — a cost that’s easy to cut out and avoid entirely.
As any developer or engineer can tell you, the cost of fixing a bug increases exponentially as it goes unnoticed throughout the development cycle, since the number of pieces that depend on the fault (and subsequently need to be modified) also grows.
Launch an application or website onto the market with serious bugs and you could find yourself scrambling to fix them, all while users complain and orders and payments that should have been processed smoothly suddenly run into barrier after barrier.
QA testing most definitely isn’t a cost. Quite the opposite — by reducing the risk of your project getting bogged down in bug after bug after its release, quality assurance testing actually lowers the total cost of most projects by reducing total development time.
You can automate QA testing with no serious downsides
Automated testing is a process that allows you to simplify testing by using scripts to guide virtual users (in this case, automation software) through your app before it’s released. Since QA testing is often broken down into units, automated tests can be used to test one unit in particular detail.
There’s nothing wrong with automated testing, at least now when it’s used properly. Done right, automated testing can simplify the QA testing process and lower costs. Done wrong, however, it can leave you with an application that passes every test but is still full of serious faults.
The reason for this is simple: machines aren’t humans. Since automated tests continually use the same inputs, they produce software that’s optimized perfectly for specific inputs, but not at all capable of dealing with the more unpredictable, variable behavior of human users.
In some cases, automated QA testing is a useful tool for simplifying small parts of the QA testing process. Just don’t expect it to serve as a useful replacement for real, crowdsourced human QA testing.
Finding bugs is the sole responsibility of the QA team, no one else
Hiring specialist QA testers is a great way to bug test your application and make sure it’s ready for release, but it shouldn’t scare you out of reporting bugs you find on your own.
Leaving quality assurance solely to the QA testing team can often result in developers ignoring bugs that they come across in their own testing, or even submitting buggy code in the belief that the QA testing team will find it and clean it up.
Instead of taking a “code first, test later” approach to quality assurance, it’s a far better strategy to make QA testing a priority for your entire team. If someone discovers a bug or has questions about how your software is performing, create a process for them to note and share the issue.
Your QA team, and your end users, will thank you. The more collaborative you can make your business’s approach to quality assurance and control, the easier you’ll find it to release work that’s free of serious errors.
QA testing is easy – it’s just the same as using your app
There’s no need to QA test when you can just use your app yourself, right? Unfortunately, this attitude is alarmingly common, to the point that some apps are released with major bugs that go unnoticed throughout the development process because they’re unique to a specific platform.
Quality assurance is one of the most consistently undervalued parts of any business, from the technology industry to heavy machinery engineering. It’s easy to think of QA as the process of finding faults, rather than as a deliberate process to eliminate faults and quality issues.
The reality of QA testing is that it’s one of the most important steps in improving the quality of your end product, whether you’re releasing a virtual product, a physical item or you’re involved in delivering a service.
Excellent QA testers are worth a great deal, and they can truly make or break your project. It’s easy to pass testing off as an unnecessary or simple part of your project, but the value of a team that can dig deep into your application and find faults is immense and easy to underestimate.
There’s no point in QA testing at all unless you can test everything
One of the most common excuses used to justify avoiding or skimping on QA testing is that it’s ultimately a worthless process if every aspect of an application can’t be tested.
The assumption here is that if some parts of an app are tested and others go untested, the app will still contain some bugs, ergo the entire process is pointless. After all, what good is testing if it still leads to a buggy, if somewhat less buggy, application?
In reality, it’s impossible to have a truly bug-free piece of software. There will always be some combination of hardware, software and user that causes your app to misperform. The point of QA testing is to reduce the amount of these situations to the smallest possible number.
All software has bugs. Your goal with QA testing should be to minimize the number of bugs that affect your software and make sure that critical, important and frequently used processes are as defect free as possible. You can’t get them all, but you can get the vast majority of them.
Are you guilty of believing these QA testing myths?
It’s easy to believe myths about QA testing and minimize its importance in the development and marketing process. Are you guilty of believing any of the QA testing myths listed above? If you’d like to knock bugs out of your next application, try our on-demand crowdtesting now.
