You’ve completed development on your latest release and it’s passed all QA tests. You release it on Monday evening and return to the office on Tuesday morning, only to find a long list of bug reports from users. What gives?
Quality assurance testing is an important aspect of any application’s development, but it’s not a guarantee that your app will be 100% bug free. From time to time, small bugs can slip through a QA tested app and make their way into its final release, even with thorough and frequent testing.
Below, we’ve listed some of the most common reasons your QA testers might not catch every bug in your application before its release:
QA testers need to work within your limitations
Your product ships in a week and you need thorough quality assurance tests to be carried out before its release. Without an extremely large team and testing budget, the above project will undoubtedly result in a QA testing process that fixes most bugs, but still leaves some.
Strict deadlines can affect the QA process and result in missed bugs, since it takes a great deal of time to test an application in different environments. A rushed testing process motivated by an impending deadline can result in missed bugs that affect your application’s quality.
There are several ways to avoid this potential problem. The first is to set aside more time for QA testing throughout the development and release process. The second is to scale your QA team, so that it’s capable of carrying out more thorough testing in a shorter period of time.
This is where crowdtesting can be hugely valuable. If you’re on a tight deadline and need your app to be thoroughly tested for quality assurance, a team of 100 can identify bugs with greater precision and speed than a team of ten QA testers pushed to the limit to meet a strict deadline.
Your QA team wasn’t large enough to spot the bug
The classic adage about more moving parts producing more points of failure is also true when it comes to software. The larger and more advanced your application is, the harder it becomes for your QA testing team to detect every bug.
This means that as your application grows in size, your QA testing team and process also needs to grow. The number of tests carried out needs to expand as the application gains new features and code. With every new developer, there’s a need for additional quality assurance testing.
Frequently, applications that ship with bugs do so because they were QA tested by a team that just wasn’t large enough to meet the needs of the application. They ran every test on every type of device available, but ultimately couldn’t find everything before the application’s release.
It’s important to develop a culture of quality for your business, and this means growing your QA processes at the same rate as your development and marketing. If QA seem to frequently miss bugs, it could be the result of too few testers being spread too thin on too many tests.
QA testers are human too, and no one is 100% perfect
No process is perfect, and no QA testing team is capable of detecting every bug within each and every application. The huge diversity of devices, software and locations means that your app will eventually be used in an environment in which it wasn’t tested, creating the potential for bugs.
From missing one test out of hundreds to leaving a specific device out of the testing process, it’s far from uncommon for QA to miss certain bugs. However, having a second set of eyes to carry out each test limits the potential for QA testing mistakes to seriously affect your final release.
This is another aspect of crowdtesting that makes it such a valuable QA asset. Since every test is carried out at scale by multiple people, the possibility of a tester’s mistake affecting your app’s quality is minimized, often to the point that it’s no longer a factor to worry about at all.
Tap into the power of crowdtesting with MyCrowd
Our on-demand crowdtesting platform at MyCrowd QA lets you access hundreds of QA testers to test your app on a diverse range of devices to find bugs before your customers do. QA test your application using MyCrowd today to make sure undiscovered bugs don’t make their way into its release.
