Quality is the most important factor when it comes to gauging the success of the software application as it is directly related to the customer experience.

Software testing today has been a milestone when it comes to the approach, techniques, tools and goals compare to its early years in the field. Imagine being one in the early days as Software Testers. Quite odd, right?

Before I talk about the differences of QA Testing way back and of today. Let's define milestone.

What is a Milestone?

Any project or startup can “survive” without milestones. That’s true. But, will every project be delivered on time without milestones? And will it be exactly how you wanted it? That’s more unlikely. Milestones are hugely important for the Agile team and project success overall. They help you stay accountable, stay on track and complete things on time.

I would say that milestones are closely related to road mapping. After completing a road mapping process, you might want to divide your roadmap into iterations and milestones. Then you can see approximately which features are assigned to each milestone.

A milestone symbolizes an achievement, is one of the most important aspects of project planning, because project milestones are the most visible indicators of project progress toward its objectives. Failure to meet a milestone indicates that a project is not proceeding to plan and usually triggers corrective action by management.

Early days of Software Testing

To understand where software testing and quality assurance fit within the history of software, it’s important to keep in mind that programmers need to fulfill several distinct goals in order to make users happy. One of those is debugging. Another involves configuration testing, or making sure a program works in all of the environments for which it’s designed. Another is assuring user-friendliness. And the list goes on. It was not as intensive as today since programmers tend to work in a smaller teams and an ad hoc approach to software testing works well enough.

Modern QA Testing

Today’s QA Testing has been standardized adopting the agile method to which ensures the quality in a faster turnaround and risk-free performance as well. The need for software quality assurance is justified and established diligently.

Familiar with Agile methodology?

There are two different types of development methodology today. The Waterfall development which traditionally emphasize documentation and spending more time to perfect the code, while Agile at faster implementation of any project working on about being collaborative, flexible and adaptive. QA process as a standard at every stage of development eliminates avoidable errors and bugs while the site is still on production or staging. This reduces number of iterations, redundancy and thus improves the overall efficiency of the development process.

Software testing in the next generation

Software Quality Assurance has never been easy. In the field of software development that is rapidly changing, more companies adopt agile development methodologies, DevOps approaches, and the like. One of the milestone we could look forward for the next generation is the Test automation. In the emerging software testing trends, testing is not just about automating test design, or any other single part of the testing process.  But it’s about automating how the tests are derived and designed, as well as how tests are managed and executed. The goal is to reuse existing components and artifacts and use/modify as appropriate, whenever possible and therefore processes and procedures are documented, communicated, enforced and tracked.

With the fast-paced growing industry when it comes to innovation in software development in the recent years, it was and will be even more challenging for the next generation of SQA. QA professionals now have a deep understanding of how to make software better. It simply implies that as the definition of quality evolves together with these changes.

Get started now and improve your business’ customer experience: contact Starshot Software's digital experts to QA outsourcing services!