QA Mentor
Automated Testing For Optimized Workflows

Not long ago, software development cycles took years to deliver a working model due to various unavoidable limitations. Test engineers had to go through multiple iterative cycles to deliver ‘daily-driver’ quality solutions and services. Despite such rigorous development stages, bugs were an evident part of the end-solution, leading to regular patches and bug-fixes that served as maintenance updates for these applications. Automation testing, on the other hand, has proven to be a practical solution that reduces the number of development cycles, enabling testing and development at a much faster rate contrasting to manual practices. In a recent interview with Ruslan Desyatnikov, Founder and CEO of QA Mentor, we discuss how Automation Testing could serve as a vital component of the development cycles with a variety of applications and use cases.

How does Automation testing benefit developers and organizations in streamlining their workflows?

In the modern day, by merely feeding input criteria, simulation parameters, and boundary conditions, we can simulate a wide array of probable outcomes that help development teams to deliver code much quicker with much better quality. Nowadays, the common theme is time to market and very quick cycles through Agile Methodology. How can you build the time in the schedule for a development team to perform quality checks on their work? There is no room to allocate time for testing as developers can barely complete development on time most of the time. This is where QA Mentor can come into the picture. Equipped with 56 resource automation pioneers and 65 automation tools and solutions, QA Mentor addresses diverse use cases in the Automation testing industry throughout the Software Development Life Cycle, starting from inception. The company’s proprietary testing frameworks provide a helping hand to development teams during their development phase especially for API and REST Services automation. Prior promoting the code to the QA Environment, QA Mentor can utilize static code analysis tools to identify problems at the code level and prevent buggycode promotions. By utilizing static analysis and code reviews, QA Mentor helped many organizations to secure their investments and suspend payments to third party vendors until the vender’s code related issues were completely fixed. What about Development testing? QA Mentor has a solution for this by offering Unit Testing on demand services, something which development teams never seem to have time for.

Consider the development cycle of an application. With every update or change in UI (user interface), the application’s scripts need to be modified. This becomes more of a hurdle than an accountable development for companies seeking shorter time-to-market. A development process resembles the maintenance checks conducted for vehicles periodically; without continuous updates, the scripts are likely to stop working just the way a vehicle would without adequate maintenance.

With automated testing, scripts are updated with every iteration, decreasing the burden of developers with regular modifications. Through this process, QA Mentor aims to significantly cut down the amount of human resource, financial expenditure, and productive hours expended. With just a few clicks and input parameters, the company considerably streamlines the number of iterations with script augmentations, generating instant ROI for their clients.

How does QA Mentor assist companies in the migration to an Automation testing ecosystem from their legacy practices?

We have seen that many our clients do not necessarily have required test cases for automation or sometimes, the ones they have are dated and obsolete. Such scenarios will not only stall automation but will create problems in ensuring comprehensive automation test case coverage is achieved despite the absence of manual test cases repository. The company conducts detailed evaluations and assessments with their clients to understand automation needs within their organizations. Taking complete ownership of the automation testing portfolio, QA Mentor diversifies their offering to suit their clients’ needs. Companies requiring constant support through product development and companies that seek an initial boost to propel them towards the automated testing ecosystem are both benefitted equally with respective solutions and services. Additionally, QA Mentor catalyzes compatibility testing automation for these organizations through QA Mentor’s test lab with over 280 mobile devices and 350 browsers and operating system combinations.

What are some of the applications and use cases of automation testing?

One of the clients of QA Mentor, a global bank and one among the fortune 500 companies, required the automation of 12000 manual test cases that periodically consumed six weeks execution time frame and a team of 23 QA professionals to complete the regression testing cycle. In just 15 months, QA Mentor was able to automate almost 85 percent of the regression testing repository, allowing the company to realize ROI from the second week of engagement by completing an environment health check for daily deployments. Over five thousand hours of manual execution was reduced to only four days, the existing client’s manual resources could focus on more productive operations. ROI generation was almost instant and turn around time to complete regression testing cycles was instantaneous. QA Mentor deployed a team of eight automation engineers for a duration of 15 months and scaled down to only three Automation engineers for maintenance and support function.

How does the future look like for the company in the next 12-18 months considering geographical enhancements, technological advancements, and upcoming product releases?

Having established offices at eight different locations worldwide, QA Mentor plans to expand its reach across the world by establishing locations in low cost areas such as the Philippines and Pakistan, and through a continuous acquisition strategy by acquiring young and ambitious startups. This expansion paves the way for one of our future endeavors, a product launch of a Test Analytical Platform—QAMometor, as an addition to the array of solutions and services offered by the company. Other product developments come in the form of another product called QA Coverage that allows clients to manage requirements, build test cases, establish traceability between requirements and test cases, and report defects and risks associated with a release. QA Mentor believes that educating industry leaders and professionals with the capabilities of automation testing could lead to efficient and faster workflows, and in turn, simplifying the development processes significantly, improving quality from the initial phases of Software Development life cycle, minimizing defect leakage, expanding automated compatibility testing coverage, and providing superfast turnaround times on regression testing cycles.