A forage into testing for iMedia

As platforms develop and have widespread use, the need for robust applications increases. After all, you don't want Joe public's tweets turned on you for poor performance of an application! But as the complexity of functionality increases for the applications, the risk of 'breakdown' increases too.

This means that testing applications under real-use scenarios becomes more important. However, it is difficult to match the experience of a tester with useful tools of the trade, and account for the constant up-skilling they need to tackle emerging situations. Do you value your testers? You should. They are your quality assurers. They protect your reputation – if you let them.

How do you know you're employing the equivalent of a professional tester? Good question, and Epicentre: testing and support addressed this in epicentre.co.uk/what-defines-a-professional-tester (21st June 2013).

How vulnerable are different sectors of clients like insurance, law, healthcare, financial services, it, telecommunications, UK government, media and advertising for testing nightmares? See the white paper, Web Application Vulnerability Statistics 2013, Jan Tudor, Contextis (June 2013). You might find some surprising information that will affect some of your projects.

There may be a bit of friction between the developers and testers because they have opposite approaches to life and the universe. Developers code to get things working; testers work hard to break the code to ultimately strengthen the development. Easy to see the potential for friction. Ericka Chickowski goes further than this in Getting the Most from Web Application Testing Results, explaining that often the lessons learnt from testers are not implemented by coders because they can hardly communicate with one another. Is this a problem for you? Did you even know it might be?

We all want to improve the quality of performance, surely.