Are Your Developers As Good At Testing As They Think They Are?

This tutorial explains Developers-QA codependency and its solution. Also, learn about Katalon Recorder and automate your browsers with the Katalon tool.

Gone are the days when traditional software development methods were very important and consumers were your final testers. It is now the era of breakneck product delivery speed.

Just one glitch can cost you your company. To balance quality and profitability, testers and developers are united into one cohesive pipeline to continuously develop and test the application.

But for testers, is this practice as beneficial as it seems? 

In this blog, we will see the current software testing practice from a QA team member’s perspective. It also includes a solution to a dire dilemma that the developers-QA codependency may entail, hence offering a peace-treaty resource for fellow QAs team and a transition for some developers along the way.

Are Your Developers As Good At Testing As They Think They Are?

Rise Of An Old Strategy

Aside from unit tests, most of the testing portion is the responsibility of QA. While some developers specialize in developing testing software, for the sake of clarity, we will focus on UI end-to-end testing that is traditionally carried out at the end of the software development life cycle by testers.

This test is important because it directly impacts the end-user experience, which is the primary audience of the product, hence the income source for the business.

You might have noticed that the term “traditionally” is used. That is because quality assurance is getting done sooner and by more personnel, as multiple statistics confirm the downside of a bottleneck testing model.

Research from the Ponemon Institute discovered that, on average, early detection of the bug would cost around $80 to fix if detected in the early production pipeline. But if detected after they have moved into production, the fixed price is a staggering $7,600.

Another reason for this is the interference theory, that the act of forgetting results from different memories interfering with one another. It is also proportionate with the similarity between those events. In the traditional method (V-model or Waterfall), the testing stage doesn’t start until developers finish coding.

Therefore, as developers move on to new projects, the testers are still detecting bugs from the old ones. When the testing results come out, it’s scientifically proven to be more challenging for developers to recall the original code structure to make appropriate changes that won’t affect the whole system.

Amid such concerns, raise the shift-left approach: integrate testing early into the pipeline instead of segregating it in the final portion. The idea is that to save the cost, time, and human resources, later on, teams will conduct both static and dynamic testing as early as possible in the cycle, hence the term “shift-left”.

With the new strategy, the testing portion is sprinkled equally among testers and other stakeholders of each stage like PM, UX designers, developers, etc. As part of an agile methodology, shift-left relieves time-consuming bottlenecks early on while there’s still time and scope for radical changes.

From a business perspective, this means release can be made faster with better quality, which is the key in the “Quality at Speed” age.

Shift – Left Approach

So what does Shift-left mean for the Software Development team?

While the traditional model has QA teams waiting on the final product, shift-left involves testers early on, spotting bugs in requirements with clients and business analysts, or design sessions with developers and product managers.

Furthermore, testers have more time flexibility to map in-depth end-to-end testing plans and get themselves used to tools and new technologies if needed. Imagine how happy the clients would be knowing their app is delivered on par with the deadline, meet the requirements, yet achieve better testing coverage than those from your competitors’ software development teams.

Taking it into reality, it also means a tightly collaborative environment between testers and other stakeholders. Among the collaborative relationships, the most common is that of the developers and the QA teams.

According to the State of Frontend 2020 Report, more than 70% of frontend developers are responsible for testing either independently or together with QA specialists. It also gives a nod to the importance of end-to-end testing, with 40% of developers performing UI tests themselves. While this movement highlights the radical realization of the shift-left’s benefits, one other problem arises.

In the 2019 Front-End Tooling Survey, almost 36% of developers currently do not use any tools to test their applications. It’s a well-known fact that manually testing hundreds of end-to-end testing is time and capital-consuming.

Moreover, the additional work will affect the developer’s cognitive load because their expertise is on the wrong side of the scale. While testers are trained to “break” the software, developers build them. Therefore, as the number of new domain requirements (regression manual testing) increases, the cognitive capacity available for software development activity will decrease.

Instead of being a time-saver, shift-left is putting time constraints on the developers’ team, hence creating roadblocks for other teams depending on the product code in the pipeline.

The best solution is to deliver fast and break nothing

One of the major myths for Shift-left is that there are no tools to aid Shift-left. In reality, the shift-left is aligned with Agile practices. Therefore, automation tools play an important role.

Understanding the demand, companies attempt to create many developer-friendly testing tools, aiding Shift-left’s implementation and enhancing collaboration productivity. The ideal tool for Shift-left is one that can be used across departments within a development environment, robust with a low learning curve.

Among the few tools that meet and exceed those requirements is Katalon Recorder, a lightweight record-and-playback web extension with the ability to generate automated tests. By not requiring any complex configuration, Katalon Recorder unlocks many testing possibilities for all members of a software development team, especially developers.

The possibilities are as follows:

• The record and playback function can help developers automate manual testing activities such as form filling, game automation, or user-flow procedures.
• Data-driven tests and AI-backed test analyses allow testers to access real-time information, enabling in-depth testing orchestration and activities down the line.
• Test Scripts Export from Selenium IDE opens doors for Selenium IDE users to have their scripts in various formats and frameworks (Python, C#, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy, XML, Protractor, and so on).
• Automation Tools integration with Katalon Studio and Katalon Test Ops enables software development teams to streamline their testing process while enhancing their test quality with advanced test generation, reporting, and test orchestration needs.

Using Katalon Recorder

Let’s see how to start using Katalon Recorder.

To start using Katalon Recorder, first install the free extension either through Chrome or Firefox web store or on Katalon website. After a few clicks, when Katalon Recorder is on your web, simply open the extension and click on the Record button to start recording your actions on the web.

When you are done, press the Stop button to stop the recording, and press the Play button to execute the recorded steps.

To use advanced analytics and data visualization capabilities, click on the Report button. It might require you to login into the Katalon portal. If you don’t have one, a free account on the Katalon website is just a few clicks away. These capabilities are made possible through integration with Katalon TestOps – an AI-backed analytics and test orchestration platform.

With the integration of Katalon Recorder and Katalon TestOps, all of your test results will appear in a centralized interface. This acts as a hub for real-time data and analysis from all the tests migrated from Katalon Recorder. To enhance collaboration between members, all charts and reports are shareable among teammates.

Both Katalon Recorder and Katalon TestOps are built by the Katalon team. It is a well-known software testing platform provider. We bet you’ve already heard the name Katalon Studio, one of the most widely used codeless testing tools in the market.

Here is a Quick Video tutorial for automating your browsers with Katalon Recorder:

Conclusion

While 100% defect-free is impossible, disastrous bugs can be avoided on any new release with a collaborative strategy for development and testing.

We can be much more productive if we are mindful of the activity that we engage in every day, because only then will we consider how we can improve our procedure. Better yet, we can expand our professional horizons to see that there’s a tool out there that can help us immediately.

Among the tools on the market, Katalon Recorder is an excellent tool if you are looking to transition into a software developer in a test that promises a seamless experience in automation testing, with all the power, and without the steep learning curve.

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