Kaz Frankiewicz
February 27, 2014
Software quality assurance solutions are services designed to optimize performance, reliability, and quality in any business’s applications or IT systems. These technologies have become increasingly essential tools for accomplishing any task in the corporate environment, not to mention every other aspect of our lives.
This becomes especially important when a company wants to launch a new piece of software, upgrade to a new version of the software they already use, or do more advanced work like migrating to virtual machines or moving their applications to the cloud. As advanced as software has become, it still remains impossible to predict how it will function when scattered across 100 or 1000 desktops company-wide, each running on different hardware and software.
Services like load testing ensure that such enterprise software will function properly in all the required environments. And that’s just one example of the type of tests that should be run to prepare technology for company-wide use. According to NRG Global, a provider of software quality assurance solutions, 82% of enterprises say slow application performance affects their productivity. If issues like these can be improved upon through due diligence when technological solutions are installed, business can be run that much more efficiently and put such software issues behind them.
Software quality assurance solutions are common sense services for every business to employ. But they can also be overlooked because they stray so far from the main thrust of day-to-day work. Tight deadlines or projects running over the time allotted for them can lead business to take shortcuts such as testing software on a few users and assuming things will work out for everyone. Some business will even assume that if things get bad they can just add more servers.
What business don’t know is that adding more servers won’t solve those problems, because the issues are likely within the applications themselves. Only after the fact will some businesses realize that a delay for testing would have saved them a large volume of time and resources. This is why companies that provide software quality assurance services have looked to provide simpler technology in order to make these tools accessible by anyone, not just professional, and priced them within a reasonable range. With enticements like these, businesses should feel encouraged that taking the right approach won’t be so much of a speed bump on their march for progress.
NRG Global is one company that specializes in performance testing and their philosophy goes one step further than ordinary software quality assurance providers. NRG Global has developed a sophisticated algorithm, one that runs behind the scenes so QA engineers only have to operate a simple interface to employ it. This algorithm simulates actual human use of these applications rather than merely testing automated performance.
As described by NRG Global Technical Director Sam Benihya, “the end user looks for visual clues and acts upon them… for example, when a person wants to click on a ‘submit’ button on a desktop, he/she can still find it if it changes location or looks slightly different in color or shape.” The software NRG Global provides operates in much the same way, where a button that looks different or is in a different place can still be found by the technology. This is an innovative enhancement over software quality assurance solutions as they have been traditionally known. Benihya goes on, “and the bonus is minimal resource usage.”
The resources described above are part of a new trend in image recognition that has recently emerged in software testing. But the team at NRG Global wasn’t satisfied by making the software innovative, it was also greatly important that it be easy to implement as well. By making this process application neutral, businesses can do performance testing easily whether they are using old or new technologies. Benihya insists, “We believe this is the future of software testing.”
Image recognition seems to be at the forefront of the future of software quality assurance solutions. As recently as the 90s, these solutions were only accessible to a few big organizations. However, technologies like those provided by NRG Global are making it possible for businesses of any size to use them, which is why the company has seen such large growth in all sectors.
Not content to rest on their laurels, the team at NRG Global continues to remain flexible as the modern IT landscape shifts and changes. One of the other recent advancements they’ve made to conform to technological evolution is to add a cloud options for their services. Whatever these shifts represent, it seems they are all focused around making software quality assurance easier for businesses everywhere.
As in any other situation in business, it pays to be prepared. While many dismiss technological complications as a price of using computers, any issues they provide can be marginalized. With the right quality assurance tools at a company’s disposal, bungled rollouts and frequent IT calls could become a thing of the past