The quality of the customer experience will soon overshadow product price and features as the core brand differentiator. Keeping the customers happy is the common goal for all company employees, and QA teams play an essential role in achieving it.
Recent statistics on app UX show that an average app loses over 95% of new users after 90 days, with less than 25% of users returning on day two. Retention rates continue to fall steeply in the following period.
The common assumptions for churn are that the user no longer needs the product or is too busy to remember about it. However, according to a recent study, 67% of consumers cite poor experience as the reason for churn. Yet, only 4% of unhappy app users complain to the company, with the majority simply deleting the app and badmouthing it on social media.
Poor quality assurance testing is among the root causes of software startup failures. Stringent QA tests performed by professional software test companies during the development process help prevent the release of a bug-infested, poor-quality product. Even the smallest mistakes that slip through could lead to financial losses and tarnished brand reputation.
This article will be helpful to anyone looking to decide on an adequate testing process for their software. Read on as we explore the five primary types of QA testing and how their testing techniques differ.
#1 Unit Testing
The unit is the smallest testable component of software, so unit testing represents a low-level type of testing conducted at the ground level.
During unit testing, professionals test these individual units or functions of the classes, components, or modules used by the software under development.
Unit testing allows developers to ensure each software feature section meets set standards and criteria, even in the early stages of building software. QA professionals use this type of testing to validate that each software unit performs as anticipated.
Moreover, testing these smallest testable parts of the product helps make better sense of the underlying software code. This improved understanding of how the code work lessens the probability of a change causing a software bug to occur.
In addition, unit testing allows software faults to be identified and fixed quickly.
Unit tests are generally easy and cheap to automate.
#2 Integration Testing
Integration testing verifies that the software components or modules/services used by your application operate well together.
This stage of the QA testing lifecycle works by combining different components and testing them jointly.
Generally, finding and fixing faults in integrated components is quite difficult, but integration testing offers help at the very start of the development.
An instance of integration testing would be testing the interaction with the database and microservices, ensuring they work together as anticipated.
Compared to unit testing or smoke testing, integration tests are more expensive to perform as they require multiple software components to be up and running. Still, they run faster than the end-to-end tests.
#3 Performance Testing
Performance testing entails checking the behavior of the system under different workloads.
These tests represent a way to confirm the reliability, stability, speed, scalability, and availability of the software.
For example, testers doing a performance test can monitor the system’s response times during the execution of a large number of requests. This testing type helps determine whether the software meets performance requirements, uncover bottlenecks, measure stability during high traffic, and much more.
In addition, performance testing allows the assessment of the software’s behavior with a significant amount of data. Testers can determine the system’s potential for additional load, i.e., whether extra load would degrade the software’s performance.
#4 Smoke Testing
Smoke testing involves reviewing basic software functionalities to assess whether major system features are working as expected. It’s a software testing process that determines whether the software is stable or not.
This test type is generally quick to execute, and it is especially useful after a new build or an upgrade. Smoke tests are a great alternative to expensive, lengthy tests in determining bugs or mismatches in the newly deployed environment, as they consist of a minimal set of tests.
Smoke testing is basically a confirmation for the QA team to proceed with further, more elaborate, and in-depth software testing.
In addition, this testing type also assesses the severity of software failures that could postpone its release.
#5 Acceptance Testing
Acceptance tests are formal tests used to verify whether the entire system works as intended and satisfies business requirements.
It represents the last test in the QA cycle, carried out just before the software’s final release.
This test is done by replicating user behaviors within the entire software. Throughout the entire test, the software is running, while testers measure its performance and reject changes if specific goals are not met.
Depending on the business, acceptance testing can take various forms, such as beta testing, application testing, field testing, or end-user testing.
To Wrap Up
At the core of effective QA testing lies a clear definition of the testing goal.
A good quality assurance process places equal importance on the users’ ability to use the software and the application’s stability when unexpected actions occur.
QA tests are used to detect frequent software development issues, such as architectural flaws, poor design decisions, invalid or incorrect functionality, security vulnerabilities, and scalability issues.
And while much of QA is testing the quality of what has been done, a significant portion is anticipating the software’s reaction if a user makes a typo or attempts to save an incomplete form.
Quality assurance testing should help in understanding the software’s limits. Thankfully, the QA environment entails an array of different test types adequate for diverse stages of the development lifecycle.
All the types of testing listed above aim at ensuring the final product delivered to users meets the required quality, stability, and security prerequisites.
