Tag: guest post

How To Compliment Software Outsourcing With Agile Development? 

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

As technology advances at a breakneck pace, speed and adaptability have become critical for fulfilling client requirements. While traditional project management systems such as the waterfall approach are incredibly precise and controlled, they do not foster adaptation or feedback.

However, firms across a variety of sectors have succeeded in transforming the way their projects are managed through the use of the Agile development technique. Businesses whose primary business is software development have profited the most from the Agile methodology. 

Today, the value of agile methods in software development is well recognized. Not to mention, the benefits are only brought to those who are clear on what precisely to expect from a software development service provider. Agile improves your development team’s effectiveness and results in a more coordinated project management strategy. Therefore, thorough research before hiring makes a lot of sense in order to work on your expectations.

Along with the increasing popularity of Agile software development, another trend is picking up quickly, and with good reason is software outsourcing. Outsourcing software development has overtaken in-house development as the second most popular trend in the industry. 

Indeed, several businesses have begun to include agile methodologies into their offshore development processes as well. Their purpose is to combine the cost savings associated with outsourcing with the adaptability associated with agile development procedures. However, this begs the following question:

Is it possible for software outsourcing and agile development to coexist?

IT  Outsourcing is a widely used method of accelerating corporate operations and making them more efficient and competitive. Outsourcing enables organizations or independent software vendors to accelerate project delivery. Given the benefits that both Agile and Outsourcing provide to the software development cycle, collaborating on a project is undoubtedly a good option.

Coordination with an overseas team, on the other hand, might be challenging owing to a lack of face-to-face contact, cultural differences, and time zone differences, among other factors. Meanwhile, if a strategic strategy is used to integrate these masterstrokes for software development, the project delivery cycle may be accelerated and elevated.

To overcome the obstacles that collaboration between Agile and Outsourcing entails, both sides (companies and technology partners) must work together. The below section explores some effective strategies for establishing a successful Agile-Outsourcing relationship.

How To Compliment Software Outsourcing With Agile Development?

1. Choose A Trustworthy/Skilled Technology Partner

A technology partner is a business that comprehends the underlying concept of the program and assists in its execution. To begin, a comprehensive investigation of the organization should be conducted, determining whether their portfolio and prior expertise are applicable to your project. Thus, a set of indicators may be reviewed to determine whether the technology partner has the capability to execute a project according to the needs and standards established in advance. 

2. Assess the Team as a Whole, Not Individuals

Finding excellent programmers with extraordinary talents is not a difficult task for customers wishing to outsource a software project. Agile development, on the other hand, necessitates a high level of team participation; it is all about collaboration, not individual perfection. Each team member is critical to the project’s success, and each member must feel at ease cooperating with others, whether in offshore locations or in their own nation. 

As a result, the programmers’ track record in a team context is more essential than their individual accomplishments. Consider utilizing behavioral interviewing techniques to pick team members in the same way that you would when employing staff for your business.

3. Interact

To flourish as an outsourced and Agile software firm, there is a need for adjustment, since these two concepts do not always mesh well. To be successful, it is necessary to carefully modify the Agile software development process as well as the communication channels between the customer and the outsourced provider.

4. Mitigation of Risk

Everybody will claim to be agile. Therefore, if you are otherwise satisfied with the provider, condition awarding the project on a successful iteration/sprint that results in the delivery of functioning software to you. Make Certain that your sprints are brief. Define the success criteria in detail, including acceptance tests and the delivery timetable, as well as any additional criteria that are critical to you and your business. Following each sprint, you’ll have the chance to evaluate the offshore team’s performance, make required improvements, and lead the project in the correct path.

After analyzing the team’s performance and working style, you should be able to determine whether you can accomplish your business objectives while collaborating with this offshore team.

Conclusion

Embedding agile practices throughout the IT department is a journey – a lengthy one. By enlisting a vendor as a partner on the journey, businesses may alter their IT development while retaining the benefits of outsourcing. This dispersed agile partnership necessitates collaboration on a variety of levels, as well as the ability to learn from and adapt to the outcomes. The incentives are substantial for those that do it right, including much cheaper costs, access to a big pool of technology-savvy labor, and the capacity to operate constantly and fast across different time zones.

<This is a guest post by Emily Cooper.>

Author Bio – Emily Cooper is a technical writer with a passion for writing on emerging technologies in the areas of software development, .NET and Dedicated Software Development. 

<Image Credits – Unsplash.com>

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How to create a document outlining your Test Strategy?

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

With the software revolution, all excellent project managers know that if you hasten into the testing process, that particular project is considered to face a lot of issues. 

Working with the best test management software and its particular strategy planned before testing starts is essential because software becomes more complicated with more sequences of code to evaluate. 

Without a definite outline to develop, the QA team might not be sure what their duties are, what type of testing should be performed first and how the project’s progress is being determined.

The initial action to developing a test plan is to understand what you are attempting to perform with the testing strategy document as it will change software testing strategies. 

According to this post created by TatvaSoft experts, the purpose of a test plan is to describe the complete scope of the QA method from both a comprehensive and granular standard. 

Let’s take a look at one of their sections and understand why they consider that having a Test Plan for every business is beneficial— 

A Test Plan is a thorough document that outlines the test strategy, objectives, timeline, estimation, deliverables, and resources needed to execute software testing. The Test Plan assists us in determining the amount of work required to confirm the quality of the application being tested. The test plan is a blueprint for conducting software testing operations as a well-defined procedure that is meticulously documented. Read More 

The software testing approach helps to create a test plan as it is one of the most essential aspects of the complete testing process, as it describes accurately what the testing team requires to succeed and how to proceed to achieve those aims. Test Strategy is a crucial part of the Test Plan.

The task of writing a whole document test strategy from start may seem daunting, especially for bigger projects. If QA managers need a systematic approach to this responsibility, however, they’ll discover that planning and compiling an efficient and comprehensive test strategy isn’t so hard.

Here are a few tips for your team’s benefit-

Steps To Create A Test Plan Using Best Test Strategies!

Understand the product or feature you’re testing

We will begin with one of the essential aspects of software testing strategy, which is having a broad knowledge of the product or feature before you begin developing a test plan for it. 

For instance, let’s assume you’ve just worked over a website redesign and need to test it before you launch it in the market. For that, you will require to know these below-mentioned factors: 

  • Discuss with the designer and developer to know the extent, goals, and functionality of the website.
  • Review the project documentation which is developed by the project manager that includes SOW, project plan, and the responsibilities in the project management tool.
  • Conduct a product examination to know the functionality, user movement, and defects.

This action provides you with the setting to write a good test strategy document, purposes and begin to plan out the sources you’ll require to create it.

Define the test objectives and their criteria

As you describe every other test you’re continuing to work on, you are required to apprehend when your test is “finished.” 

This implies establishing the pass and fail standards for each particular test, and some of the information we can discuss, such as departure and delay criteria.

To perform this, you’ll need to recognise different system metrics that you’re monitoring and select what progress means for them. 

For instance, if you were working on a performance test you need these measures to succeed:

  • Response time: Complete time to forward a request and receive a response.
  • Average load time: Average time it needs to address all requests.
  • Peak response time: The most extended time it needs to complete a request.
  • Wait time: It is the duration it needs to get the first byte after a demand is sent.
  • Requests per second: The number of requests it can manage during that one second.
  • Events passed/failed: The whole number of passed or failed requests.

Don’t worry you can proceed with testing and repeating forever. So you are required to determine what’s best for your software out and in the palms of users.

Plan the test environment

The outcomes of your test plan always depend on the point you’re testing as well as the environment you’re testing it in. 

As a component of the test strategy document scope, you are required to decide what hardware, software, operating system, and tool compounds you’re running to test.

This is a condition where it pays to be particular. For instance, if you’re going to define an operating system to be utilised throughout the test plan, specify the OS edition/version rather than just mentioning the name.

Define Test Objective

Test Objective is the complete purpose and performance of the test execution. The purpose of the testing is to discover as many software errors as possible; guarantee that the software during the test is bug-free before release.

To determine the test purposes, you need to perform these 2 steps:

  • Record all the software features such as functionality, appearance, and GUI that may require testing.
  • Determine the purpose or the object of the test according to features

Use these steps to get the test goal of your testing project

Also, you can use the ‘TOP-DOWN’ approach to discover the website’s features that may require testing. In this process, you break down the app following the test to component and sub-component.

Conclusion

The test strategy document provides a definite concept of what the test team will perform for the entire project. It is a latent document that means it won’t fluctuate during the project life cycle. 

The one who prepares this document must have enough expertise in the product field, as this is the record that is running to manage the complete team, and it won’t fluctuate during the project. 

Test strategy documents need to be distributed to the complete testing team before the testing ventures start.

<This is a guest post by Matthew Jones – who is a tech enthusiast. and he likes to share his bylines.>

My interview with Fabian Böck featured on Youtube -“Never Feel Stuck”

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

I was recently invited by Fabian Böck for a chat over on his Youtube channel where he frequently interviews people in tech on various topics of interest in the industry. My talk was focused on how to steer the direction of your tech career. We had a fantastic talk about how to pave learning avenues, set for yourself time to reflect, and how companies should be enabling their workforce. And most importantly, how to ‘Never Feel Stuck’ in where you are – even if you are happy or not and use continuous learning and self improvement to guide yourself to better places!

Here is a link to the video interview-

Fabian’s company Boeck and XOXO works on Tech Conventions x Matchmaking Marketplace x Tech Talks. Check them out for more interesting talks and content!

Check out the Linkedin posts here – https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6821385665146691584/

Cheers

Nishi

Are You Driving Talent Away?

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

Regardless of size, your business can ill afford a high employee turnover rate. That’s because restocking on talent is costly, with Forbes reporting how hiring a replacement costs employers 33% of the outgoing employee’s annual salary. So, if an employee who earns $45,000 annually resigns, replacing them could cost the company $15,000. Crucially, it takes new hires 8–12 weeks to get up to speed and be at their most productive best, which means your business isn’t just losing money with high employee turnover — you’re also sacrificing productivity.

It goes without saying that employee retention is vital, especially in light of work-from-home setups making things trickier and a lot more challenging. That said, you might be driving away members of your team unknowingly, and adversely impacting your company’s bottom line.

As such, it is now time to take a long, hard look at your management style, and check if there are practices or company policies that might be pushing even your best employees out the door. In particular, you might want to determine whether or not you are guilty of the following, which are sure to tick off your team and get them looking elsewhere.

Setting Unclear Goals


Chron contributor Jim Woodruff details how employees respond favorably when they know clearly and concretely what the company expects from them. In turn, they are more likely to be enthusiastic about work, and in working towards those goals. Setting goals is particularly important in this era of remote work given the difficulties of communicating company objectives to offsite teams.

Without clear goals to guide them, employees working from home can grow easily distracted, and will be tempted to look for either greener pastures or something more fulfilling. Business writer James Gonzales highlights how when working from home, the days tend to melt into each other and can become monotonous. This makes it crucial to have goals for employees to keep them motivated, and working towards the attainment of concrete goals. Whether professional (as in a promotion) or personal (like skills development), these goals will keep your team engaged, and much more likely to stay.


Micromanaging


Micromanaging is a surefire way to drive a wedge between you and your employees. This is none truer than in remote working setups, where micromanaging — as in requiring hourly work updates and tracking hours — is generally misconstrued as a lack of trust on the part of management. Whether that’s true or not is moot, as the mere thought of it is enough to demotivate your employees, to the point of making them consider leaving.

Moreover, micromanaging can put undue stress on your employees, who have to deal not just with work, but also with your constant check-ins, nonstop instructions, and grating leadership style. This results in increasing stress levels that can cause burnout and a host of physical maladies that will severely compromise your employees health, until such a time that taking time off or resigning become their only options.

Here are some tips for employees and managers alike –

Ideas for Self-Care when working from home

Tips to keep your Sanity and Productivity Intact when working from home

Not communicating enough


While employees don’t want to be micromanaged, they don’t want to be left in the dark either. They want you to check up on them from time to time, and will appreciate it if you do. This is most true for remote teams, as bumping up communication, according to a previous post on telecommuting by Nishi Grover Garg, is one way you can show engagement and build connections with your employees.

Your failure to communicate, however, can cause friction, confusion, and frustration, as well as a lack of clear direction. It can even stress out your employees, with 4 in 5 Americans admitting to being stressed out due to poor office communication. Tellingly, a 2017 Gallup report underscores the need for better engagement, as it found that excellent workplace communication increases employee retention and productivity by 24% and 17%, respectively.

Here are some tips on Ways to Stay Engaged with your team when Working from Home

exclusively written for testwithnishi.com

by Rowena Jill

Rowena Jill is an entrepreneur and writer who is passionate about inspiring leaders to be better. In her spare time, she loves to bake and tend to her indoor garden.

Image Credits – https://images.pexels.com/photos/3874627/pexels-photo-3874627.jpeg

Defining Your Definition of Done

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

The success of your team and the release depends on everyone getting their individual parts done in time. But how do you define being “done”? What indicates a finished task and differentiates it from a half-baked one?

It is all about having a clear definition of done established and agreed upon within the team from the onset of the project. Check out my article published at https://blog.gurock.com/definition-of-done/ – Here I talk about some good ways to define your Definition-Of-Done

Brainstorm with your team

The person who is going to work on each task is obviously the best person to comment on how and when it will be closed. So, the first step would be to discuss and list the obvious things these people deem would need to be done in order to be able to say that their task is done. Sometimes, you may be surprised how different these “obvious” points may be for different team members.

For instance, Tester 1 may say that after executing tests on their user story, they also spend an hour doing exploratory testing before completing their testing tasks, while Tester 2 did not consider that as part of the task. They completed the test execution task once done with scripted tests and later, if time permitted, would perform some exploratory tests.

By doing this exercise you are baselining your expectations from each task, independent of its owners.

Consider quality goals

If you are seeking to come up with a definition of done, there is probably an area you are trying to improve and some quality goals you are trying to achieve, so consider them now. Think of what seem to be your team’s problem areas, or the source of their delays at the end. Now add a part of those quality goals in the relevant tasks.

For example, let’s say your builds seem to fail too often, and that leads to a lot of rework and retesting within the sprint. After some analysis, you found that the build failed because of developers checking in buggy code, mostly lacking integration tests.

Read More »

Top Cross Browser Testing Challenges and How to Overcome them via Automation

Nishi Grover Garg2 Comments

Have you ever wondered how to successfully automate your cross-browser tests? With the number and type of mobile and tablet devices available in the market increasing daily and the crazy combination of browser types and browser versions making things even more complicated, if you are a website or web app developer then making sure your application renders and functions correctly on all those combination of browsers, devices and platforms is often enough to make you want to pull out your hair! Add things like compatibility and browser support for IE11 to the mix and things can get pretty tense. However, with the recent advancements in cross browser test accelerator technologies today we can perform these cross browser tests more reliably and more extensively than ever before.

Before we delve deeper into different approaches to automate your cross browser testing efforts, let’s first see what Cross Browser Testing is all about, why performing cross platform compatibility testing is often inadequate because of the various challenges associated with it, how to mitigate these challenges via test automation and finally, all the features to look for when comparing some of the best cross browser testing tools to automate such testing efforts.

What is Cross Browser Testing?

Cross Browser Testing is the type of testing where we verify to ensure that an application works as expected across different browsers, running on different operating systems and device types. In other words, by performing this type of functional testing a tester checks the compatibility of a website or web app across all supported browser types. Thus, by conducting specialized browser testing, you can ensure that the website / web app is able to deliver an optimal user experience, irrespective of the browser in which it is viewed or accessed.

Major Challenges with Cross-Browser Testing

Let us face it! Testing a web application across all major browser/device/OS platform combinations can be a seriously daunting task. One of the major pain-point with performing thorough Cross Browser Testing is that your testing team would have to test the same website or web application across all the different browsers, operating systems and mobile devices. This is when each browser uses their own different technology to render HTML. Mentioned below are some of the major aspects that make cross browser testing challenging.

1. It is IMPOSSIBLE to test in All Browser Combinations

Let’s assume that your contract with the client mandates that the website or web application being developed should support Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. While this may rather seem a little too formidable at first, it actually is pretty manageable:

macOS: 4 Browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera)

Windows: 4 Browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

Linux: 3 Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

That’s a total of 11 browser combinations.

But not all your end users are expected to be using the very latest version of each of these browsers. So it is often safe to test using at least the latest 2 versions of each browser.

macOS: 8 Browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera)

Windows: 8 Browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

Linux: 6 Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

That’s a total of 22 browser types.

Now that we have taken the latest 2 versions of each browser type into consideration how about the latest versions of each OS? Surely, people upgrade their OS far less often than they upgrade their browsers, right? So to be safe, let’s test across the latest 3 versions of each OS platform.

macOS Catalina: 8 Browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera)

macOS Mojave: 8 Browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera)

macOS High Sierra: 8 Browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera)

Windows 10: 8 Browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

Windows 8.1: 8 Browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

Windows 8: 8 Browsers (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

Ubuntu 20.04: 6 Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

Ubuntu 19.10: 6 Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

Ubuntu 18.04: 6 Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera)

That’s a total of 66 browser combinations.

What started out as a manageable list is now already a substantial and daunting list of browser combinations to test against even for teams with a dedicated team of a good number of QA specialists. Add to the mix the possibility of testing across 32x and 64x variations of each OS type, testing across various possible screen resolutions and the fact that you’d need to retest across each of these combinations every time there is a bug fix, it is easy to feel frustrated and even give up!

Read More »

Top 3 New Year Resolutions for Testers!

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

Here we are gearing up for another new year! As time flies by, we may start to feel stuck in one place, unable to move forward in our careers. Testers can get bogged down by too much to learn, too many directions to take, and so many tools and technologies.

But that’s no reason to stagnate. By making some goals now, you can aim to start improving yourself and your career development right away on January 1st.

Here are three goals testers should have for the coming year. Make it your New Year’s resolution to achieve them, and go for it with an action plan in hand! Read the full article at –> https://blog.gurock.com/new-year-resolutions-testers/

Improve your Mindset

The first resolution should be to create and maintain a healthy mindset. Mental peace and team harmony should be the goal.

Continue Learning

There must be a routine, a drive to better oneself and a constant search for improvement. All testers must resolve to take up some kind of continuing education so they can always be adding to their skill sets. Learning cannot be a one-time activity.

Get Better at Networking

The next resolution a tester must make is to participate in the community in some way.
The knowledge you have is better shared with others, and the pace of learning in a community will be much faster than alone.

Read More —>

Mental Health for people in tech

Nishi Grover Garg3 Comments

The technical industry is characterized by high stress, long work hours as well as workplace pressure. This demanding environment blurs the line between your professional and personal life.

Your mental health suffers a lot in the constant social pressure to network and make a name for yourself. Here, are certain ideas to implement at your workplace to take care of your mental health.

Speak your mind

Speaking your mind can help you maintain your mental health. Don’t consider sharing your feelings as a sign of weakness; it’s a part of taking charge of your wellbeing.

Though it’s hard to talk about feelings at work, but if you have colleagues you can talk to, it can really help. Find your tribe at work who can be your peers with whom you can share your day to day problems, issues and seek advice, or open up with family and friends outside work.

Identify triggers

Everyone has different triggers for anxiety in the workplace. It could be doing a presentation or writing reports or going to a company function. You must track situations that make you uncomfortable in order to prepare.

Read More »

What the NAPLAN Fail Tells Us About Testing in Education?

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

Implications of Software Testing in the field of Education

The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) are school tests administered to Australian students. This August, the online program was offered to 1.5 million students. Students failed to log on. 

Had the software undergone functional testing, the program could have launched successfully. A functional testing company verifies every function of the software function as per requirements. It is a black box type of testing where the internal structure of the product is not known to the tester.

Functional and Performance Issues – Naplan’s problem has been ongoing. In March, it took students 80 minutes to get to online tests. The requirement was of 5 minutes. The software performed shockingly different from what was planned. 30,000 students had to retake tests, which too were marred by technical glitches. The test data was not automatically saved. The data recovery time was 15 minutes compared to the requirement of zero minutes. Once again, the software did not perform as expected. Eventually, the problem was resolved, however, it came at the expense of dropouts and time lags. 

Accessibility Issues – Naplan software had other errors that a functional testing company could have taken care of. The features that were designed for students with disabilities were not functional. Alternate text for students was missing, incorrect and inaccessible for students with auditory disabilities. The color contrast was poor. The color contrast was of immense importance to those who required accessibility help with seeing visuals. 

In the Naplan case, a functional testing company would prepare several test cases to verify the functionality of the login page, accessibility features, load times and data recovery times against the requirements specified. Functional testing would cover unit testing, integration testing, interface testing, and regression testing. In addition to manual testing, a functional testing company would perform automation testing. Software testing tools automate tests to improve the accuracy and speed of execution.

Read More »

Prevention is the Best Cure- for Defects in Agile

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The agile methodology focuses on building in quality from the very beginning of the software lifecycle. That is why we aim to find and fix defects early on: A defect found and fixed in an earlier lifecycle phase is a multitude cheaper than the same defect at a later stage.

But how can we more easily make it possible to prevent defects from percolating deeper in the software development lifecycle by fixing them in their nascent stages?

This is the main theme of my latest article for @Gurock TestRail blog – where I explore and explain ways to foresee, analyze and thwart defects in an agile context.

The main points discussed are-

Communication

Conduct Reviews

Demonstrate Often

Static Analysis and CI

Click Here to read the complete article –>

Please support by liking / commenting and sharing the article!

Cheers

Nishi