Xray has saved companies from costly software failures for more than 5 years now. But what did companies do prior to such a powerful tool for quality and test management?
Apple’s value declined by $30 billion after the release of Apple Maps in 2012, due to the app’s glitches and bugs.
Just a few years later, a software glitch stranded 42,000 bags at London Heathrow Airport for 10 days. Besides the debilitating reputation loss, it was estimated to cost the airport $2.5 billion in repairs.
More than ever, companies realize that good QA processes reduce the risk of costly software failures.
With this in mind, we’ve rounded up 4 Strategies to help prevent software failures in your organization – keeping you from losing billions in repairs and reputation.
Strategy 1: Adopt Continuous Integration to Prevent Failures
Loss of reputation leads to loss of revenue. When your business depends on being a trusted, industry leader, your money and reputation is on the line with every product release or update. Adopt continuous integration to create an effective quality assurance process and prevent future costly software failures.
Continuous Integration refers to a development practice where the developer’s improvements and fixes are integrated to the main code “line”/branch several times a day, by means of fast, automated testing feedback. This will allow for any bugs, performance degradation or security issues to be identified at their source and promptly fixed.
Continuous integration is just the first step, let’s dive deeper by seeing where your testing should take place.
Strategy 2: Implement Continuous Testing with Shift Left Strategies
85% of bugs happen at the first stage of the software development life cycle. The cost of catching a bug later in the development cycle is 40x the cost of finding it during coding. Testing early, also called Shift-Left Testing, minimizes the cost to repair a defect, consistently alleviating bugs by pushing the product through development stages only when it is properly working.
Most importantly, for Shift-Left Testing to be effective, it requires testing teams and engineers to work together.
It takes collaboration and transparency for any two teams to align, so how do we connect two teams that traditionally work apart?
Strategy 3: Level-Up Your Workflow with a Unified Toolset
Use an integrated development and testing toolset to shorten build time and ensure quality.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of miscommunication when developers and testers are using different tools. At Xpand IT, we’ve worked with organizations that have experienced up to $3 billion dollars in damage repair which happens when teams work separately. XRAY, our test management application for Jira was born as a solution to this problem.
By making a test management platform that directly integrates into Jira, Xray became the best solution for collaboration and transparency in the software development life cycle.
A unified tool set is a huge transformation towards an agile workflow, and will set you up for success with our final suggestion: Automation.
Strategy 4: Advance with Automation
Automation will save testers 20-40% of their time spent on catching errors.
With Xray, once automated tests are properly set-up with integrations like Cucumber, they can run again and again. This allows products to glide through testing. With this solution, teams can focus on what’s important: fixing those bugs and consistently delivering quality solutions to their customers.
Automation defines the future of testing. Companies that automate their testing and quality assurance processes have a competitive advantage over others.
In the end, software can still fail even with great QA practices.
We’re human after all, but despite that, there is always a way to mitigate the severity of mistakes. With continuous testing and integration, a unified test management tool, and automation, you increase the quality of your product and significantly lower the chances of defects after deployment. This means that even when something does go wrong, you have more time to fix it quickly because you have 1 thing to fix, not 10.
Xray empowers teams to close the gap between testing and development. This collaboration accelerates agile software development, significantly reducing risk of software failure and costly repairs for defects.
Want to learn how to perform test management and quality assurance in Jira using Xray?
Download our eBook: A Quick Start Guide for Test Management to get started.
