import test blog

This is why handing your application to the right team of beta testers is so important. You need a team of qualified people who know what to look for and know what you are looking for and can provide insight into how well your application matches up to expectations.

There is more than one type of beta tester. There are the professionals who can test the functionality of your application and will report every difficulty and mistake they find. Then there are those who directly relate to your customer base. These testers are your potential customers and your main concern will be how well they like your product. While both types are important, the first group is essential. Handing off an application to the second group, without first testing for functionality, will undermine any useful information they might provide. The first group should be hired professionals, while the second may be drawn in by offering incentives. However, make sure they really are interested in your product and not just in the free gift.

You should avoid people who are biased in one way or another. Recruiting your friends and relatives to beta test is rarely a viable option. So, be selective. It's best to hire type one beta testers before releasing your product, whether you plan on running type two tests or not. And the best type ones can be supplied by established companies with experience in the beta testing field.

It's important to vet beta testers to ensure that they have the right technology to run your app. The environment in which applications run can cause problems, which is why knowing the beta tester's platform is important. If the tester has the right platform, then you have a very good chance of getting accurate feedback. Also, even correct platforms can be slightly different from each other and seeing how these slight variations affect your application is something you can't get under controlled lab conditions.

Beta testing is a process that entails feedback from people who are not part of the original development team. They are there to provide new eyes that can see things that others have missed. Ultimately, the quality of beta testing depends on the quality of beta testers.  

Speed and flexibility testing

With exploratory testing, the mobile application becomes an open book without expectations or anticipated results. After all the full iOS8 effect on an existing application is unknown.  Exploratory testing allows the tester to expand their knowledge while exploring workflows - good, bad and bizarre. Test coverage and flexibility is enhanced because testing is limited only by the creativity of the tester. Exploratory testing uncovers the inherent nature of the application in a rapid and flexible manner. It doesn’t require any special tools or training and can be scheduled as needed during any point in the development cycle.

Test coverage and value

Exploratory testing increases the value of regression or certification testing because it finds defects. Exploratory testing finds defects other testing misses because it focuses not only on expected or negative results, but also on actual end user experience. Testers are mobile application users proficient using multiple platforms and excited to test iOS8.  Who better to discover hidden defects other testing can’t find? Exploratory testing provides rapid effective test coverage and finds defects important to customers. Testers can explore scenarios involving functionality, security, and app integration that otherwise often go untested due to time constraints and unknown release effects, as with iOS8.

Exploratory testing as a service

The world doesn’t need other “as a service” acronym but ExTaaS sounds intriguing. There are companies forming to fill this need, and one is Bugwolf. Bugwolf users are provided a variety of options that include a pre-built test environment, testers, and test management services.  Bugwolf’s services significantly reduce testing cycle time and lower the cost of beta testing by up to 50%.

Manual testing is often viewed as expensive and slow. However, it is the most effective way of finding critical defects (read http://www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf by software testing expert James Bach for more information). Exploratory testing is gaining momentum as 100% automated software shops find themselves drowning in customer reported defects for mobile, web or old-fashioned client-server system platforms.

Repeatability; how sweet it isn’t

Automated testing supporters espouse the benefits of repeatable tests. Repeatability also means selecting specific test data that is known to exist and generating a passing result. The test script may create data, manipulate it and then remove it.

Users do not enter perfect data and then remove it. Repeating the same tests over and over again with simple variations of the same perfectly entered data will not find bugs. Executing automated tests repeatedly finds reportedly between 6-30% of defects (Cem Kaner August 2000; Architecture of Test Automation).

The impact of test stagnation

Test stagnation affects both manual and automated testing but it’s more prominent in automation. Automated tests are typically simple tests covering non-complex code variations. Running those same tests repeatedly, even if a defect is found, it typically is not significant enough to fix.

Often the automated test engineer edits the test to pass and fixes the script after the release. Supplementing this with manual testing enables the release to deploy as planned assuming the automated test failures were false.

Automated test maintenance plan and pay

All application code requires ongoing maintenance, and automated tests are code. If you don’t plan on maintenance time and cost your automated testing project becomes an expensive failure. Anytime the code changes, the automated tests break and must be edited and enhanced to include new functionality. Do you change your application code frequently?

Balance testing for higher quality, less risk, and greater returns

Balance is the key. Balance automated testing with manual exploratory testing. Options exist for organisations that can’t afford more resources or don’t want to hire manual testers. There are services that provide manual exploratory testing at a reasonable cost when you need it. Use a testing service to provide increased test coverage, find user defects and reduce release risk.

WCAG In A Nutshell

Ask any project manager if a production bug blocking twenty percent of users completing purchases should be fixed and the likely answer would be likely be “Yes please – and you’re fired.”

But ask the same manager if they want to put WCAG testing in scope and often they are reluctant, providing responses like, “we’re already spending a bunch on browser and device testing.” or “just do a bit at the end.”

Yet in so doing, you may very well be excluding a greater percentage of users from your site.

The Real World

Examples of accessibility are present everywhere in the world around us - public buildings with wheelchair access ramps, designated toilets and disabled parking spots to name but a few.

It’s part of modern consciousness that we realise there are people with different needs in society and ensure where possible that we provide amenity for them.

But that’s the physical world.

Virtual Reality

Surprisingly, in the realm of technology, a sector where “new” is often everything and adaptability to change is paramount, we don’t have an equivalent provision for disabled users. Websites that are easily consumable by people with disabilities are something of a rarity. In fact, in 2011, a CAST survey of Australian websites revealed that 98 percent were not WCAG Level 2.0 compliant.

Well, What Is WCAG?

Aside from being an acronym that rolls off the tongue like a cat choking on a fur ball, WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There are three levels at which you can meet criteria:

Level A – the most basic web accessibility features

Level AA – deals with the most common barriers for disabled users

Level AAA – the highest level of web accessibility

These guidelines provide testable statements that are technology agnostic and have graded error levels.

WCAG has four overarching principles that work hand in hand to enhance disabled users’ access of your site:

Perceivable

1. 1 Provide text alternatives for any non-textual content so that it can be converted into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language.

1.2 Provide alternatives for time-based media. (Video, Podcasts and so on.)

1.3. Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example simpler layout) without losing information or structure.

1.4 Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.

Operable

2.1 Make all functionality available from a keyboard.

2.2 Provide users enough time to read and use content.

2.3 Do not design content in a way that is known to cause seizures. Flickering of around three to sixty hertz a second can invoke these.

2.4 Provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are.

Understandable

3.1 Make text content readable and understandable.

3.2 Make web pages appear and operate in predictable ways.

3.3 Help users avoid and correct mistakes.

Robust(ness)

4.1 Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies. By user agents we mean browsers across an array of devices.

Love All The People

It’s statistic time. Get ready for the bullet points.

• Just under one in five Australians (18.5% or 4 million persons) reported having a disability in 2009

Almost 12 million Australians have one or more long-term eye conditions, based on self-reported data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2011–12 National Health Survey (NHS). This includes:

• 1.3 million with astigmatism (blurred vision)

• 882,000 with presbyopia (farsightedness)

• 450,000 with colour blindness

• 371,000 with cataracts

• 196,000 with macular degeneration

• 131,000 with blindness (complete and partial)

That’s a heck of a lot of people.

Add in those with hearing difficulties, motor skill impairment and cognitive issues and you have a group numbering in the millions that may encounter problems using your site in any meaningful way.

WCAG Is Win / Win

WCAG is great for social responsibility but it also makes solid business sense to avail your services to a sizeable sector of potential market. Globally Fifth Quadrant Analytics found that the disability market sector represents an annual disposable income of $1 trillion—and $544 billion in the US alone.

It’s the epitome of a win/win scenario and return on investment. By making your site WCAG compliant, you’re enabling customer take-up you would otherwise be excluded from.

Rethink Your Personas & Solutions

Information technology used to be pretty much guys and girls wearing bad rayon shirts in dusty cubicles coding in silence with the occasional manager walking past on the way to afternoon golf.

Now, marketing has integrated into tech offices, manifesting as a main driver for software goals. Read beyond the executive summary of many documents and you’ll find a lot of user personas aimed at targeting software to a specific audience’s need, typically reading something like this:

(Note: tongue firmly in cheek)

“Project Manager John is 45 and has two teenage sons and enjoys walking his Irish Setters on the weekend. John has a high degree of computer literacy. His life would be complete if only he could find a banking experience that was simple and easy to use.”

But one persona you should be coming across yet most likely aren’t is something like this:

“Cat owner Sophia, 75 has been a loyal customer with Banks Are Us for thirty years. Having recently developed macular degeneration, she wants to continue using online banking with Banks Are Us using screen reading technology.”

Your customers are getting older. It might be time to change with them.

Who Does WCAG And When?

In an ideal world, one where Melbourne has a pleasant winter, kookaburras never pinch your sausage rolls and where French fries have antioxidant superfood powers, WCAG would be a line item for discussion in any project kick-off meeting, permeating the software development cycle as a global consideration.

Let’s pretend …

Plan your pages to be accessible from the outset. Primarily this task falls into the lap of developers who can test pages as they code so the controls and functions they create will work for disabled users too. As much as we talk about WCAG Testing it all begins with WCAG Coding and developers need to be briefed on the framework before commencing.

From there, proceed as per your normal process with sprint based verifications.

It’s much better taking WCAG into consideration as development progresses than assessing on product completion and having to refactor code close to release.

Do bear in mind however that WCAG relies on content presentation so if you have a large amount of content to populate after code and test phases have completed, allow another iteration to perform a final assessment and correction if required.

What Are The Benefits Of WCAG Testing?

We’ve touched on many of the benefits of WCAG throughout but let’s sum up and throw a few more into the mix for consideration.

• You open the gates to users who couldn’t previously use your site increasing market reach and potentially share.
• You build social confidence in your brand.
• Your SEO optimisation improves as it's easier for search robots to consume.
• You gain competitive advantage over those who have not implemented WCAG standards.
• You’re helping people with older technology and slow connections utilise your site.

Once again: You’re helping people.

How Does Bugwolf Do WCAG?

Bugwolf employs a three-part process to perform WCAG testing. Initially we determine the WCAG and alert level the client wants to achieve.  From there we use browser plugins such as the Wave Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool to report on the status of every page in the nominate site, capturing video of the analysis along with the provision of written reports.  

Depending on requirements, we may run each page through a WCAG tailored html validator to flesh out any critical code errors.

Finally, in order to ensure full coverage, we perform a manual verification of each page against the relevant WCAG level checklist. Clients have full visibility of results and can utilised them to move towards their desired level of compliance.

Start WCAG Testing With Bugwolf

If you’d like to run WCAG testing, we’d be glad to help.

Bugwolf helps you audit your digital assets in accordance with WCAG compliance. We do this by providing flexible, on-demand access to professional UAT teams.

Existing Bugwolf clients are invited to conduct their own gamified WCAG challenges on demand. To find out more, speak to your Testing Director.

If you are new to Bugwolf and would like to learn more about how to get started, the quickest and easiest way to find out more is to Request A Free Sample UAT Audit.

Useful Resources:

How to Meet WCAG 2.0: https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/

Understanding WCAG 2.0: https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/

Wuhcag - Web accessibility for developers: https://www.wuhcag.com/web-content-accessibility-guidelines

It may have taken organisations 10-15 years to start thinking digital, but there is a very good chance that many of their employees have been using technology and been surrounded by digital since the early inception of the internet. There is also no one in the industry which knows your business, products, and services better than your employees do.

At Bugwolf, we recognise there's a wealth of digital and technology experience already residing within your organisation - with your employees. To harness this wealth of expertise and knowledge, our platform can assemble large groups of employees as user testers who compete over short periods of time to provide you usability and user experience feedback about your products.

By making your employees part of your digital transformation process, it can mean great things for your company culture, turning them into a marketing workforce to be reckoned with.

IBM has released a Discussion Paper titled 'Born on the Cloud: Disrupt like a Start-Up'. It explores how the combination of cloud computing and entrepreneurial spirit has led to the emergence of a new generation of disruptive start-ups – those that are Born-on-the-Cloud (BOTC). The paper also provides insight how traditional businesses can emulate attributes of BOTC startups and be ‘reborn’ on the cloud.

In the white paper Ash Conway, CEO of Bugwolf notes, “It’s about starting small and de-risking that whole process by picking a project and moving that to the cloud - assessing it, measuring it, learning from it and then, potentially, looking at other ways they could move other infrastructure.”

Ash also talked about the need for Enterprise companies integrating more start-up into their business by partnering. He said, “It would be a good thing to see large enterprise embracing the local startup community more and bringing them in and seeing what they can cultivate together.”

This white paper requires no registration. Read Born on the Cloud: Disrupt like a Start-Up

Advances in communication, such as the Internet, are making health care information more easily available to both physicians and patients. Not only can the doctor more easily check the patient, the patient can more easily check the doctor. Information that was once confined to intimidatingly large textbooks is now available in understandable chunks that can be easily understood, even by the lay person. We have even see the advent of telemedicine, which uses the Internet to diagnose and treat patients at a distance.

However, these advances don’t always make things easier. The Internet is full of unvetted information and advances in technology make physicians more dependent upon a sophisticated infrastructure that require considerable capital investment.  This, in turn, makes doctors and healthcare professionals more dependent on those who supply the capital. Even so, few people would want to give up the advantages that IT brings.

Many hospitals are using digital and wireless in a number of different areas, from patient care to genomic medicine and in controlling and making the best use of assets. The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology enables them to keep track of such assets as cell phones, medicine, IV pumps, gurneys, wheelchairs and laptops. This improves inventory management, keeps vital supplies easily available and helps in the sharing of equipment.

The increase in the number of applications  and Web based operations has given physicians a toolkit that enables them to diagnose and treat patients in a more effective and error free manner. Technology is making it possible for doctors to examine patients without the need to be physically present in the same room. This is enabling doctors to see more patients, especially those in remote areas who would not normally have access to the sophisticated medical infrastructure available to those who live in urban areas.

This is only the beginning. Digital innovation makes it possible to increase the quality of care, reduce costs and improve diagnosis as well as patient safety. Digital technology is driving a revolution in healthcare by increasing the capabilities of both the medical infrastructure and the physicians themselves.

Developed in response to demand from the WEF’s partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Digital ASEAN project will take on the roadblocks that stand in the way of the growth and maturation of the digital economy in that region and help build the infrastructure that will allow business, governments, and nonprofits to realize their full potential.

The nations that make up ASEAN represent the world’s fastest-growing internet market, adding 125,000 new users every day. The gross domestic product in the ASEAN sphere is expected to increase by $1 trillion over the next decade, but there are obstacles to that growth and prosperity that Digital ASEAN seeks to eliminate, such as:

• Insufficient digital infrastucture
• Restriction on cross-vorder data exchanges 
• Lack of consistent rules and regulations governing ecommerce
• Inadequate data/privacy safeguards
• Cumbersome business licensing requirements 
• Lack of digital payment solutions
• Weak defenses against hacking and cyber-attacks
• Shortage of the empirical evidence needed to inform better policymaking

ASEAN has already specified various policy suggestions and frameworks to mitigate some of these concerns. The hope is that the research and initiatives that come out of Digital ASEAN will be able to generate the buy-in needed to make the large-scale changes that are required. Broadly speaking, Digital ASEAN will be focusing on these three areas:

1. Moving toward a digital single market by enabling ecommerce and cross-border data flow.
2. Building enabling digital ecosystems with digital entrepreneurship, digital human capital and identity, better cyber resilience, and better research for evidence-based digital policy.
3. Improving digital infrastructure, access, and literacy.

Digital ASEAN’s portfolio will be shaped and guided by a board of fifteen advisors, consisting of business leaders, academics, ASEAN ministers, and the ASEAN Secretary General. Each of the three major areas of concern will have its own working group made up of multiple stakeholders, and the ASEAN Regional Business Council—a group of 70 companies involved with the WEF’s efforts in Southeast Asia—will also be active in managing the project and setting its priorities.

The days of software development being divided up into various cubbie holes are long gone, it just isn’t practical anymore. This is why DevOps was created and a series of best practices have developed as it evolved. Here are some of the most important best practices that keep DevOps running smoothly.

We can start off by remembering that everyone on the team is important and deserves respect. There is no such thing as a stakeholder you can ignore. For example; operations and support staff are just as important as end users when it comes to the areas they are responsible for. Developers must be willing to listen with an open mind.  And it’s a two way street, those further down the line must be willing to assist those earlier in the development cycle. Don’t just throw a problem at the other guy and expect it to be fixed and don’t make inordinate demands.

Use automation as much as possible. Test often and fix problems quickly when they are found. Use automated regression testing and integrated configuration management to keep continuous integration running smoothly.

Integrated change management is also important. DevOps brings various solutions into play at the same time, so it is necessary to develop and implement a strategy to ensure that the IT infrastructure evolves in a manner that best supports the organization.

Maintain integrated deployment planning so that everyone is on the same page at all times and you can avoid the problems of feature creep and mission creep. It also avoids teams getting siloed into their own little corner of the operation.

With continuous integration comes continuous deployment. A successful integration in one sandbox can then be handed off to the next automatically, right up to the transition from development to operations.

The most important element is to stay in communication. This may seem like a no brainer, except that there are a number of ways to go out of communication. Egos can clash, information can get lost and people can become so concerned with doing their jobs that they treat handoffs in a too casual manner. DevOps is more than a change in practices, it is a change in culture. Traditionally, people were mostly concerned with getting their part of the job done right. While this is just as important as it always was, it is also important to make certain that the other fellow has the tools and knowledge to do his job as well. This makes for a smooth running team. And such a team is the best guarantee of successful deployment.