Why is testing needed?

You might have a brilliant idea that is market-ready, and you might have a great team to bring that idea to life. But your ultimate success will depend upon how your product performs and is perceived by the end-user.

As we at Steady Rabbit say, “Only tested can be trusted”. So, you can only be sure about your product’s performance and how it will be perceived based on the testing results.

Many clients in the past have asked us if testing is necessary. Let us state in the beginning here that testing of the product is essential as the development, if not more.

Now you may be thinking about that what testing is. Are there any types of testing in the software domain? And, what specific benefits I can get from getting my product tested.

Let us explore the different types of testing that are available.

1. Performance testing – In terms of IT platforms, whenever we hear the term performance, our minds think about scalability, reliability, availability, speed, and responsiveness of the platform. While your product is at the MVP stage, it may still be some time in the future that you would have to worry about scalability but the testing team creates a dummy environment to check the behaviour of each feature, say when millions of users would use the app. For, example, how will the user registration process behave when, in response to some marketing gimmick, half-million users register in a day. A crash at such popular times will definitely prove disastrous for the business.
2. Functional testing – The testing team looks out for bugs in the core and peripheral functionality of the product. They do so by executing a wide range of test cases on the product. Functional testing is essential and must be performed before the launch of the product. Any red flag raised at this stage must be fixed before the launch. Some of the attributes that get tested during functional testing are – mainline functions, basic usability, accessibility, and error conditions.
3. Security testing – This one is special on its own. While the relatively larger organisations are extremely serious about not leaving any security loopholes in their product, smaller startups are yet to catch up. Security testing is all about protecting your technical ecosystem ( that is your server, APIs etc), user data, the financial modules from being hacked or leaked. Till the security is not breached, you may assume that you are getting a great ROI on all security measures you have deployed. As otherwise it defames the product in the market and your customers can go to your competitors never to be seen again. If you are using a micro-services architecture, security measures can be deployed at several places. At the front end mobile application, JSON Web Token can be used, as this prevents unauthorised access to your web servers. Some pre-existing modules from cloudflares can be deployed at your API gateways to prevent DDoS attacks. And yes, any secure information that you save in your databases, such as password must be encrypted.  
4. Compatibility testing – There is so much innovation happening every month in the devices domain. So people are rapidly changing their softwares and hardware, that is, mobile devices, operating systems, browsers, laptops and so on. While you may anticipate the majority of the traffic coming from one particular source, in order to have a good user review, your product must be backward and forward compatible. This means that while Android 10 is the latest version, your product must also run smoothly on say android 9 and 8 at least.
5. User acceptance testing – This one too is important. The tests here are conducted with full empathy with the users. Here, the testers see if the intended business use case is actually being conveyed to the end user. If any test fails, then there is serious thinking done on the design board again to check if there is some issue with the UI/UX. After all, no amount of effort be meaningful, if the end user is unable to appreciate the features.
6. Automation testing – This is the favourite of the testing teams. Why? Because after coding the scripts to run the tests, they sit back and relax. If any bug crops up, they happily hand it over to the development team. For today’s product environment, we have automation testing in mobile applications and web portals.  In mobile apps we can Jmeter. It allows us to test for extreme cases. For example, if in 5 seconds, some hacker presses the pay button 10,000 times, how will the app behave. Will other users be denied the payment module in the application. ( Ideally, from each user a payment request should arise not more than once in about 2-3 secs. Anything beyond that could be a security threat). So with automation testing you are able to gauge how secure your app is. For web portals we have tools such as Selenium.

It will not be extreme to say that a product without extensive testing done on it is not a product, it is merely a project executed by a group of techies. To make the project product-grade, get it tested thoroughly.

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