Functional correctness over a wide range of operating conditions is a critical success factor for any of your applications. Rapid development and adoption of newer Web designs, User Interface technologies, Web standards, the proliferation of mobile devices of varying capability (hardware, browsers, screen resolutions & operating systems) along with increasing business demand for complex functionality and security complicates this picture further. Exhaustive and extensive testing can be unrealistic and expensive. You will need a well-calibrated strategy to ensure your product quality does not degrade on certain configurations. You can make use of our lab equipped with latest mobile devices, operating systems versions, and popular browser combinations.

The business environment of today is fast-changing, nimble, and competitive. Consequently, your software applications will be subjected to frequent releases. To be cloud-friendly, newer software design patterns favour a move from a complex monolithic style to a collection of loosely coupled but highly versatile and responsive services supporting the same business logic. The number of integrating services and applications creates a multiplier effect on regression impact at each release. Your regression testing strategy needs to be multi-layered and preferably automation-dependent to support the business demands of change. Talk to one of our experts to explore ways to strengthen your regression testing programme.

Many of your applications will have business, technical, and operational requirements. Some applications may have additional regulatory and compliance requirements. You may be familiar with the regular approach of application users validating these applications from their end-use perspective against relevant specifications or predefined acceptance criteria. Modern agile projects tend to use acceptance testing frameworks to validate end-user requirements early in the lifecycle. The end-users from the business, technical, and operational streams often are not experts in software testing and may miss validating the product thoroughly, thereby increasing the risk of failure in production. The test team alone may not have the necessary application insight to effectively test the solution. A combined effort will, therefore, be required from end-users and the test team to define the scope, approach, and extent of acceptance tests. Testhouse will be keen to help you if you are unsure about the applicability of a specific acceptance test framework, worried about the level of effort or coordination required, or need help defining acceptance criteria.

Your applications may already be exposing APIs to interact with other internal and external applications. We live in a digital economy where the biggest success stories are based on APIs (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.). The dependence of applications on multiple external APIs brings with it significant risks; the failure of an API can lead to the unavailability of business-critical services. Bug fixes and changes to the APIs, such as adding additional fields, can lead to service disruptions. Regression impact needs to be addressed, and backward compatibility needs to be ensured. APIs need to be tested for normal and abnormal operations, and exception handling capabilities must be validated. Further challenges you may face will include the need for technically competent testers who can programmatically manipulate APIs, supporting multiple versions of the APIs, supporting a large number of APIs, APIs supported on multiple protocols, supporting APIs on multiple versions of the same protocol (SOAP 1.1 and 1.2), and the accuracy of API documentation. API testing is a frequently requested service at Testhouse; we can advise you on the best practices.

Business intelligence and analytics applications may be guiding the destiny of your organisation today. These applications may be helping your senior management make the correct strategic and operational decisions. Often, the business intelligence layer sits above data warehouses and data marts. For your BI applications to provide correct outputs, they should receive correct data; errors can be very detrimental. This presents a serious challenge as the data sources tend to be heterogeneous and in multiple formats, the data volumes are often large (in terabytes), and the workflow is often sequential and multi-stage. Data quality, suitably sized environments, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, the need for large volumes of validated test data, tester familiarity with data modelling and data tools, constantly evolving database schema in a development environment and associated regression impact, and inconsistencies in front-end reporting can all present challenges. Work with Testhouse consultants to ensure your business intelligence applications are tested thoroughly and on time.