April 29, 2019 Topcoder Quality-as-a-Service Part 1: Automated Testing

Whether you’re trying to improve your time-to-value, adopt a more agile approach, or increase your customer-centric practices, Quality Assurance (QA) can help modernize your software development lifecycle by baking maturity and scale into your everyday processes.

But, with the rise in DevOps, agile frameworks, and disruptive development ecosystems, finding a way to position manual testing into your lifecycle can be difficult.

You need quality, accuracy, and assurance — but you need it rapidly and at scale.

How do you detect user experience issues before your app launches? Is there a way to build robust testing automation frameworks without significant onboarding and production costs?

What is Automated Testing?

Testing your application throughout your software development lifecycle is a mission-critical part of your SDLC. You need to know if your app is going to function-as-predicted at scale. You’ll also need to know whether or not there are any bugs that could disrupt your users’ experience

But, manually testing your entire application for bugs, code quality, and UX issues can be a massive headache.

Automated testing leverages AI and machine learning to rapidly automate testing environments. Instead of manually testing applications at each touchpoint, automated testing runs non-stop. Automated testing checks for breaks, UX-interruptions, bugs, and app failures.

It’s important to note that automated testing isn’t a replacement for manual testing. Instead, it should be thought of as an additional testing solution that can be layered over your entire QA program. Automated testing is highly scalable and flexible enough to be used across development channels. But, it can’t test all QA avenues (e.g., visual testing, exploratory testing, localization and accessibility, etc.)

At the same time, automated testing is necessary for a variety of testing channels, such as stress testing, spike testing, and load testing. Overall, automated testing offers better ROI than manual testing.

How Topcoder Can Help

Building an automated testing environment can be costly. You have to onboard employees who understand the nuances involved in automated testing, glue them to your existing development framework, and spend the resources to actually develop a customer automated testing solution.

At Topcoder, we help you cut out the expensive onboarding and building. Instead, we give you access to thousands of experts with the skills and expertise to execute sophisticated, custom automated testing solutions without the expensive onboarding and talent search.

How does it work?

Let’s take a look at an example.

Global Swiss Investment Bank Use Case

One of our clients — a Swiss investment bank — wanted to introduce a Selenium-based automation framework into their agile development environment. They needed a generic yet flexible automation solution that could rapidly test web applications. Since automated testing can rapidly test applications during a development cycle, they can quickly increase the size of your test suite — something that was critical for a multinational financial institution needing to leverage digital experience at-scale.

Instead of spending time and money onboarding professionals who understood the nuances for automated testing, they hired Topcoder to help them quickly adopt automated testing solutions.

Utilizing our deep well of data scientists, designers, developers, and testers, we were able to present their Selenium-based automation solution in just five days. Plus, our team of 54 Topcoder members from 18 different countries provided four alternative frameworks for different use cases.

All of the deliverables (Selenium-based automation frameworks in this case) were developed by both our Topcoder team members and Wipro engineers to provide best-of-breed QA competencies within a rapid timeframe.

Why The Swiss Bank Left Topcoder With a Smile

In just five days, our anonymous global Swiss investment bank client received their Selenium-based framework and scripts, plus four different solutions to use based on available devices and technology. Instead of spending time and money onboarding automation engineers to develop their framework, they tapped into Topcoder’s userbase of testing experts and engineers.

Final Thoughts

Building an automated testing solution can significantly increase your QA speed, accuracy, and time-to-value. But, building your automation framework can be expensive and time-consuming. With Topcoder, you get access to incredible crowdsourced QA solutions without the headaches involved with onboarding automation engineers.

Interested in supercharging your QA processes for a fraction of the price and with triple the speed? Ready to tap into our incredible well of crowdsourced talent? Contact us.

Want to learn more about how Topcoder’s Quality-as-a-Service offerings can help your business succeed? Ready to check out some other use cases? Check out our free eBook with all of the juicy details.