Testers in the software industry often encounter a range of ethical dilemmas, especially when dealing with potentially harmful or biased software. These dilemmas can be challenging to navigate and require careful consideration of both professional and moral responsibilities. Here are some of the ethical dilemmas testers may face:
Harmful Software: Testers may come across software that has the potential to cause harm to users, either through security vulnerabilities, data breaches, or unintended consequences. The ethical dilemma lies in whether to report these issues promptly or to remain silent, possibly putting users at risk.
Biased Software: Testers may encounter software that exhibits bias, such as machine learning algorithms that discriminate against certain demographic groups. The ethical dilemma here is whether to report the bias and advocate for fairness in the system or to turn a blind eye and allow the bias to persist.
Privacy Concerns: Testers often have access to sensitive user data during testing. Ethical questions arise about how this data is handled, whether it’s adequately protected, and whether testers should voice concerns if they suspect that privacy is not being adequately safeguarded.
Conflict of Interest: Testers sometimes work for organizations with conflicting interests. They may be pressured to ignore or downplay issues to meet tight deadlines or protect the company’s reputation. This dilemma involves choosing between loyalty to the employer and the duty to ensure software quality and user safety.
Unrealistic Expectations: Stakeholders, including management, may have unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved in a given time frame. Testers may face the dilemma of whether to push back against these expectations, risking conflict, or comply with them and potentially compromise software quality.
Whistleblowing: When testers discover unethical practices, security breaches, or other issues within their organization, they may face the difficult decision of whether to blow the whistle on their employer. This can have personal and professional consequences, including potential retaliation.
Unclear Boundaries: Ethical dilemmas can also arise when there are ambiguous boundaries between the roles and responsibilities of testers and developers. Testers may be asked to engage in activities that could be seen as compromising their objectivity, such as assisting in code cover-ups or failing to report issues to meet project goals.
Access to Vulnerabilities: Testers often uncover vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors. They must decide how to responsibly disclose these vulnerabilities to minimize harm and protect users, which can involve a fine balance between public disclosure and responsible disclosure to the software provider.
Bias in Testing: Testers themselves can introduce bias into testing, intentionally or unintentionally. For instance, they might focus testing efforts more on certain functionalities, neglecting others. This could lead to biased results that don’t accurately represent the software’s overall quality.
To address these ethical dilemmas, testers can consider the following principles:
User Safety First: Prioritize the safety and well-being of users over organizational interests.
Transparency: Advocate for transparency in the testing process, and openly communicate any concerns or issues discovered.
Whistleblowing Protections: Be aware of whistleblower protection laws and internal reporting mechanisms, if available.
Ethical Guidelines: Adhere to industry-standard codes of ethics and best practices, such as those provided by professional organizations like the ACM or IEEE.
Continuous Learning: Stay informed about ethical issues in software testing and continually develop ethical decision-making skills.
Seek Guidance: Consult with colleagues, mentors, or ethical experts when facing complex ethical dilemmas.
Balancing professional responsibilities with ethical concerns is an ongoing challenge for testers, but it is essential for ensuring the integrity and safety of the software they test.
You may also like our blog on “A Day in the Life of a Software Tester”
Category: Functional
5 Metrics to a clearer view of your Project’s Health and Quality
Introduction
Metrics are used to measure various characteristics of a project. They describe an attribute, as a unit. From a software point of view, they can be classified into product quality metrics or project quality metrics. Product metrics are the ones that focus on product quality by describing its attributes and features whereas project metrics focus on improving the project quality. There’s another category of metrics, process metrics which we leave for another post.
Why Quality Metrics?
Quality metrics are measured against quality standards to determine whether the product works to the client’s expectations and if the project is in good health. By good health, it is meant that the development of the software (product) is on track with minimal or negligible problems. Problems that might end up hampering the whole development process, hence resulting in delayed results.
One must understand that metrics aren’t just limited to finding defects, but is about getting insights to optimize the development process. It also concentrates on qualities like reliability, consistency, and so on. Both products as well as project metrics should be measured and monitored with equal importance.
Generally, you might find a huge number of quality metrics to measure. Let’s focus on the ones which help us analyze a project’s health by providing insights that really matter.
Following are the Metrics
Let’s look into some project metrics:-
1. Finance
Some people may not consider costing as a quality metric to measure, but in reality, it definitely is. Without laying down the budgeting plans, monitoring the expenditure, and going through the finance books, you cannot deliver something of topmost quality as one might run of resources to maintain the same. This eventually ends up affecting the project’s health. Costing should be looked after with the utmost care to sustain good quality and a healthy project. Some metrics to use are:-
- Cost Variance: Difference between the actual cost and planned cost.
- Cost per Problem Fixed: Amount spend on an engineer/developer to get the problem fixed.
2. Defect Quantification
To make the project free of bugs and errors, defects need to be quantized and worked upon(fixed). Lesser the number of defects, better the project’s health. Defects can be dealt with in many ways. All we need to make sure is to make the best out of the defect resolution process and hence increase productivity. Some of the metrics are:-
- Defect Density = Total Number of Defects / Total Number of Modules
- Defect Gap Analysis ( Also called Defect Removal Efficiency)% = (Total number of fixed defects/Total number of valid defects reported)/100
- Defect Age = Average time taken in finding a defect and resolving it.
3. Scheduling
It helps to analyse the progress made in the completion of a project. Being on the schedule should be of topmost priority, as at the end of the day, you might not want to disappoint your stakeholders with a delayed result. All you need to do is stick to the planned schedule and measure Schedule Variance.
- Schedule Variance: Difference between the scheduled completion of a task by the actual completion of the task.ie.
- SV= Actual Time Taken – Time Scheduled
Every project is eventually a product made available in the market. Following are the product metrics that one should always measure:-
4. Performance of the Project
Performance is measured by the performance metrics. Every software is designed to accomplish specific tasks and give results. It is measured if the product can deliver as per the requirement of the client by analysing the time taken and the resources used. One way of measuring performance is to set small goals and work for them. After the accomplishment of such goals, study the process. This approach ends up giving exceptional insights into the project’s health.
- ROI – Return of Investment: Comparison of earned perks/benefits and the actual cost
- Resource Utilization: Measures how the individual team member’s time is spent.
5. Usability
A program should always be user-friendly, as eventually, it has to be used by an end-user. One way of measuring this is by analysing the project from a user’s perspective almost after every step in the developing process. This will help to fix errors and bugs on the go, so you don’t have to revise the steps you took weeks ago just to fix a recently discovered bug which might end up being really frustrating. Measuring the usability metric will provide insights to improve effectiveness, bring about efficiency, and thus achieve customer satisfaction. Some metrics to measure are:-
- Task Completion Rate (used to measure effectiveness) Effectiveness = (Number of Completed Tasks/Number of Task Undertaken)*100
- Task Completion Time =Task End Time – Task Start Time
Conclusion
Summing up, now is the time to get over the traditional practices, and add this method (of measuring metrics) to your work approach. Find the weak points, prioritize opportunities, and experiment to know what works, or what doesn’t. If you want a powerful and attractive project, which is healthy and guarantees customer satisfaction, measuring quality metrics is the answer you’re looking for.
If you’re looking for more information , please contact us we will be happy to help.
Is your QA practice ‘Future-Ready’?
COVID-19 has changed the world. It has changed mine. I no longer have the luxury of breathing in the unfiltered atmospheric air, where I get to smell the delicious aroma of food from wayside vendors. There’s always a mask on my face. COVID-19 has affected the way organisations and businesses and QA practice are being run as well.
Arguably, Quality Assurance practice however, has been not so heavily affected by the pandemic, apart from, save a few structural and behavioural changes. Of course, there may be unprecedented time-to-market pressure or extreme cost pressure but, by and large, relying on the age-old test efficiency rule book will steer software teams out of harm’s way.
With regards to COVID-19, there seems to be no end in sight and as such, we must actively seek new ways of dealing with the new normal. This is essential in sustaining the QA practice while maintaining the same level of work efficiency and quality of services. I call this ” The future-ready QA practice”.
First, we must come to terms with the new normal and remote work. QA teams that used to huddle around in small spaces, writing and executing software test plans may not be able to do so anymore. Employees are increasingly being distributed across space and time zones and QA teams must adapt to the new system without compromising on providing the highest quality of digital experiences for the end user.
Let’s look at the pro’s of the new setup.
- One advantage is that work can be done anywhere, or anytime depending on contractual terms. This helps in easier time management and results in higher productivity.
- This setup could potentially improve employees’ work-life balance, and spillover into positive attitudes towards work.
- It eliminates the travelling time and cost, the day to day cost of spending a day at office and hence, helps save some crucial time and money.
All the above being true, this does come with its own challenges. Employees may not have an official setup (office desk, space etc.) fast internet connection, depending on which part of the globe you’re practicing, which could cause release cycle delays and disruptions. Employers must therefore make provision for the requisite tools needed for a smooth practice at home. This could mean accelerating the adoption of digital cloud computing services; SaaS, or helping employees set up adequate home networks for efficiency sake.
Cloud to the rescue
Accessing the test environment presents another challenge for remote QA practice. The test environment could be accessed remotely, either through an on-premises server or a cloud-based service. This further underscores the need to move towards a cloud-based development and test environment. While at it, automated tests must be meticulously written, they must follow the branch of code they test, be peer-reviewed, and merged into the regression set. There should be proper documentation as well, so team members at different geographical areas can troubleshoot a test as easily as the originator.
New Engagement Models
Organisations must also consider new delivery models on important factors such as data security and privacy, risk, and compliance audits. Though remote work is convenient, it poses an increased risk for internet fraud, data loss, or system compromise. While you work hard to meet your client’s expectations, hackers are equally working hard to find vulnerabilities to exploit. It is essential to obtain original software licenses and keep an inventory of all open source usage across development teams. Maybe you could add a VPN to your network, have stricter password policies and more importantly, create backups. I cannot overemphasize the Backup.
New ways to supervise and communicate
Supervision. Effective supervision is the difference between a good product and a great product. Nancy Kline, founder and President of Time to Think, described supervision as an opportunity to bring someone back to their own minds to show them how good they can be. Every employee, no matter how skilled, needs a mentor, a supervisor or just somebody to run things by. Supervisors must set achievable goals with reasonable timelines. Employees must endeavor to meet those timelines while delivering on quality. It is also important to reward hard work. Honorary mentions can be made on the organization’s internal social media groups when an outstanding achievement is made by an employee. This can motivate them to do better and remind others that they’re still being watched though they’re at home.
Adaptive and Agile Workforce
Continuous Professional Development for employees is required to maintain a competitive practice within the industry. Technology is changing. There is always something new to learn, or another skill to garner. More so, the job market is now open to anyone around the world with the required skills who demonstrates aptitude for the task at hand. Therefore, the need to constantly improve skills is now more important than ever. Digital learning, however, makes it easier to acquire skills without necessarily taking time off the job. Admittedly, it will take some effort on the employees’ part and encouragement on the employer’s part to keep up with lessons, but it is far from impossible. Ultimately, it becomes a win-win situation for both employer ( who has the most skillful testers) and employee ( who has developed himself into a more valuable asset).
Keeping the human element alive
Finally, working from home or remote work gives employees a level of isolation. Everybody loves a happy and healthy work environment surrounded by work buddies who would give you a brief pat on your shoulder for a good work done, or rub your back while you’re battling with major bugs. But remote work takes the human element away. This means that communication must be of good quality, proactive (on the part of employees) brief, (nobody wants a nagging boss on the phone for hours) and frequent. This is where tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meets come in handy. The good old telephone call works fine as well. Weekly check-in calls with all employees, seeking suggestions and opinions on what could be improved is admirable. Again, everybody loves a great party. Who says you cannot organise a bring your own bottle party on Zoom? The downside of this is that, when all’s said and done, employers may have a hard time bringing back employees into the office space. But that is the inevitable future, and the faster the acceptance, the better.
While the uncertainty of living in the Covid-19 era continues to affect organizations all around the world, only the most agile, dynamic and resilient teams will come out stronger and unscathed. Is your team future-ready?
In summary, being future-ready in QA practice testing means embracing emerging technologies, methodologies, and trends to ensure high-quality software products that meet the demands of the ever-evolving digital landscape. By staying ahead of the curve, QA teams can contribute significantly to the success of software development initiatives. This will help in delivery quality assurance and testing services.
5 things you should know about Digital Analytics
A large portion of the world we now live in, happens online. We wake up in the morning not to an alarm clock, but to our wearable devices connected to smart phones. We research things, watch videos, catch up with friends on social networks. We even get directions and book our vacations online. And everything we do leaves a trail of data behind it.
As a consumer, you might not know this, however, as a marketer, you’re using all this consumer data to make better decisions and thinking about how to spend your marketing dollars and improve your websites and mobile apps to optimize the customer experience. All the above is Digital analytics.
By definition data analytics is the process of analysing digital data from various sources like websites, mobile applications, among others. Digital analytics is a tool used by organizations for collecting, measuring, and analysing the qualitative and quantitative data. This data consists information on what your visitors/users are doing, where they come from, what content they like, and a lot more.
Type of data that can be analysed:
Structured data
- Sales Record
- Payment or expense details
- Payroll Details
- Inventory details
- Financial details
Unstructured Data:
- Email and instant message
- Payment text description
- Social media activity
- Corporate document repository
- News feed.
Business value of digital analytics:
- Identifying unknown risks.
- Deeper insight into business to predict customer trends.
- Act with confidence, based on numbers.
- Targeted approach based on your actual user base.
- Deep Analytics and comparisons into different behaviour of your user base.
- Interactive visualizations of trends
- Ability to curate projects and then share with non-analysts, making analytics more approachable than ever.
Digital Analytics Use Cases:
Modern analytics framework empowers the ordinary businessmen by bringing advanced analytics tools to their desktop. In Retail it helps to predict sales outcomes for the immediate future and in Healthcare it predicts risk of potential threats to patients’ wellbeing. Financial and risk management uses Big Data, along with predictive analytics, in forecasting demand. The Consumers and Practitioners of Digital analytics can range from a CXO to a Product Owner.
Stages Involved in Digital Analytics:
- Curate: Transforming data in a standard structure to be usable.
- Profile: Validating data at a macro level.
- Analyse: Examining data to discover essential feature.
- Investigate: Observing the data in detail.
- Reporting: Documenting and reporting in granular form as per the requirements.
Every organization, regardless of size, requires analytics tools to understand the performance of its website/app, satisfaction of its consumer and gain key context from business rivals. Most Common subset of digital analytics is to analyse the website data that is called web analytics and further let’s know how it is implemented.
Web Analytics Tools:
These tools help us to go way beyond counting hits and page views. It help us to make decisions and find the answers to questions. Different people and different roles in your organization will need different sets of data and different levels of granularity.
For example, a company head will be interested in seeing what the trends of yearly revenues are? A marketing manager might want to drill deeper and understand which marketing channels are driving those revenues? Using the data generated by an e-commerce site, these tools can tell us which products are selling well and which ones aren’t. This can help in inventory management, sales forecasting and even manufacturing or procurement decisions. And we can even deep dive and see which products are selling well in which geographic region.
Following are some trending web analytics tools:
- Google Analytics
- Adobe analytics
- ClickMeter
- Crazyegg
- Clicky
Key Concepts of the tools:
Events: Events are user interactions with content that can be measured independently from a web page or a screen load. Downloads, clicks, Flash elements, and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to measure as Events.
Dimension and Metrics: Every report in Analytics is made up of dimension and metrics. Metrics are the quantitative numbers that are measuring data in counts, ratios, percentages. Whereas dimensions are the qualitative categories that describe the data in segments or breakouts.
Page View: The number of page views refers as a count for every time a visitor loads that page.
Referrers: Indicates where the users came from, and are separated into four main types: Search Engines, Other Websites, Campaigns and Direct Entry.
Visitor: The user who made the visit. We may find the visitors divided in new visitors and returning visitors, which lead us to fidelity indexes. It also may contain a large amount of technical information about their computer, browser, operating system, screen size, plugins, location, etc.
Segmentation: Segmentation isolate your data into subset for deeper analytics and solves your problems, you can always segment your data by following: – Date and time – Device – Marketing channels – Geographic channels – etc. (Dozens of options)
Significance of Web Analytics Testing
The web analytics testing services are important to help you to see how your users are connecting to your sites. For the increment of conversions rate, you should use different testing method including Web analytics A/B testing and WAAT using selenium.
Web analytics A/B testing: This testing help us to compare two or more versions of an application or a web page outcomes. Also it enlightens you regarding the execution of clickable components of your website page. With this you’re pitting two versions of your asset against one another to see which comes out on top. This assists in getting a site with continuous execution development. Web analytics automation testing framework:
WAAT (web analytics Automation framework) is an open source and valuable framework that provides a way to automate the verification of name value pair properties / tags being reported to a Web Analytics System
Typical Business Dashboards for a web application:
- Top visited pages or journeys that is most valuable from a customer traffic,
- Revenue (by marketing channel or program)
- Opportunities and prospects
- Conversion rates, Geographic data
Culmination: In simple words it is a way of collecting and analysing what’s happening on your application i.e. what your visitors/users are doing, which is great for businesses that you want to develop and evolve without taking huge risks
Agile Testing
As a CXO, you might have often wondered how you can keep tab on your product quality and Agile testing in real time and be in control of your development schedule. How often have you wanted someone to tell you clearly and with data if the product quality is good enough to take it to market. And we know you do not need senseless reports and dashboards that are high on content but low on value
CXO Quality Dashboards
CresTech’s CXO Quality dashboards precisely solve this problem. Based on years of our experience working with top industry CXO, we have come to know how you want to measure your product quality and what you want to see from your product quality report.
Designed specifically for top management, our CXO quality dashboard give you a precise idea of application quality index in quantifiable terms and helps you answer questions like
- What is the quality index of my product?
- What are the most risky areas of my product that need more testing
- Am I fixing defects fast enough to be on top of my schedule
- What is the % of code that’s my testing covers
- How does my testing efficiency rates against the industry standard norms
- What is the quality risk if I Go-Live now
Drawing data out from your existing ALM and Test management systems, we transform the data into concise actionable indexes that can help you take key business decision like whether to go live or not with the product in an instant.
Read our informative blog on 5 Key Elements of Scaled Agile Framework.
How functional validation can help in software testing before release?
- Introduction
- What is functional validation or functional testing
- Difference between functional validation and non-functional testing
- Crestech introduces Functional Validation Testing solution
Introduction
Looking at the immense significance of Functional Validation Testing in every type and scale of business projects every company aims to add and enrich its functional testing efficiency.
Testing process on functional scale is far beyond than just looking through the specifications of the application and simple execution of test cases and processes. To test behaviour and functionality of any application, it is required to appoint testing professionals with adequate knowledge of the subject. They can assure you finest of Functional Validation Testing services by effective application testing under all the possible end user scenarios.
What is functional validation or functional testing:
Verifying whether a software stays true to its original intent of creation is the primary objective of functional validation testing. The initial system requirements are converted into features and functionalities of the application and the correctness of these features and functionalities are tested against the original system requirements. Functional Validation helps establish that the software does what it was originally meant to do.
Deciphering an application’s complex structure through a systematic testing supported by deep technical understanding of functional testing professionals is the right approach.
Difference between functional validation and non-functional testing
While functional testing confirms that the application features and functionalities are working fine, non-functional testing ensures that other aspects of the software like performance, security, accessibility are also of highest standards.
Crestech introduces effective Functional Validation Testing solution
We have test squads of learned Test Analysts and Test architects working in close coordination to ensure quality based functional validation of any application. Our testing team has wide-ranging knowledge of technical and programming architecture of advanced application structures. This makes our Software testing team efficient enough to trace hidden errors and fix them effectively.
Our testing experts hold expertise in dealing with software testing needs of top notch industrial sectors including Telecom, Banking, Healthcare, & Media.
Our Automated Testing Services are finely designed to meet quality and budget expectations of our clients. Along with implementation of propriety test methodologies like FLET- (Full Life-cycle Exhaustive testing), we indulge in applying our latest innovative test techniques.
We undertake Agile testing principles to assist our clients in following areas:
- Functional Testing
- Integration Testing
- Systems Testing
- User Acceptance Testing
- Usability Testing
- Compatibility Testing
Our solutions are designed to fit your needs and comprise of the processes, tools, templates which can deliver value to our clients.
In summary, functional validation provides several benefits in software testing, including defect identification, ensuring correct functionality, enhancing user experience, mitigating risks, increasing software quality, facilitating maintenance and upgrades, and meeting compliance requirements. By conducting thorough functional testing, organizations can deliver high-quality software that meets user expectations and business objectives.
Managed Product Quality
Poor Software Quality is a threat to your reputation and a recipe for disaster.
Often the difference between the success and failure of your software product can be explained away in a single word quality. No amount of sleek marketing can save your product in case it carries inherent flaws and you risk losing not only your customers but your reputation too.
The reliability of the software and its robustness are critical aspects in gaining customer loyalty and most organizations today simply cannot shy away from building appreciable quality into the software they create.
Poor quality leads to excessive labor and support costs
When you release a software with defects, they end up costing you a whole deal more than what you would have spent on enforcing quality. To start with, as customers start identifying defects, your developers would end up in a continuous cycle of fixing bugs. Moreover, more defects lead to demand for more support staff which invariably adds to your baseline costs besides bringing down your market share in the long run.
Keeping Costs Low while improving overall product quality
If you look at the overall scenario you will soon realize that investing in product quality would invariably give you positive results in near future. However the cost of ensuring quality may be a mitigating factor. In such circumstances you should look at taking up a Managed Product Quality service from an outsourced software services quality of offshore software testing company.
Ensure complete software quality through our Managed Product Quality Service
CresTech’s managed quality services are tailored to offer a set of testing solutions that literally change the way in which a company produces and releases software through its entire lifecycle. From taking into consideration your expectations of product quality to encompassing the best practices, we make it a point to ensure that the quality of your software product is second to none.
Some of the services that our offshore software testing unit provides here include
- Formulating an agile and effectual testing and release framework
- Ensuring best practices are diligently followed through extensive training and monitoring
- Introducing new technologies and automation tools whenever necessary
- Training your existing Testing team to achieve better productivity
- Right staffing your team
- Setting up right tracking and alert mechanisms
- Improving overall productivity of your testing team and removing process deficiencies
- Holistic testing of your applications on all relevant parameters and compliance norms. We follow the most stringent quality checks that you can rarely find in an offshore software testing company.
Why it makes great sense to go with us
Given our track record in delivering exceptional quality, we believe our Managed Product Quality service can take the load of your team and free you up from the hassle of enforcing quality.
Few reasons which make us the best offshore software testing company in business includes:
- Expertise and Experience
- Comprehensive Testing Approach
- Domain Knowledge
- Quality Assurance Processes
- Testing Tools and Infrastructure
- Flexibility and Adaptability
- Communication and Reporting
- Security and Confidentiality
- Cost-effectiveness
- Client References