Agile is today the industry norm for development. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that traditional testing practices are simply not feasible anymore - a massive overhaul is required to blend in with the Agile methodology. While this is not an easy task to achieve, it does not mean that traditional testers must be phased out completely. It simply means that traditional testing teams need to be restructured and refreshed in order to stay relevant.

When looking for the right IT partner, you likely want the best help at a price point you’re willing to pay. However, not all partners are created equal in terms of pricing, services and personnel.

There are several considerations to keep in mind when evaluating the right fit for you. Let’s take a look at five of these critical factors:

Automation in QA has quickly gone from “sophisticated and cutting edge” to “mainstream and necessary”. However, introducing automation practices into a firm’s regular workings is not without its costs: it requires additional investments in talent acquisition, automation tools, and frameworks. Even with the additional resources, improperly written scripts can cause unnecessary hassles and inefficiencies. Measuring automation success is thus crucial in understanding whether automation efforts have been fruitful or deserve a revisit.

Can you imagine what your life would be like without technology? Forget that smartphone that you’re probably using to read this article because that’s such a ubiquitous example. Think about the Internet, television, your car, airline travel or even electricity. When booking flights for your next vacation, you don’t think for a second about the technology required to not only bu ...

As companies grow, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that tasks and the people who perform them are organized in the right manner. Even the most skilled of workers tend to perform poorly when they aren’t directed as to where to concentrate their efforts on. And as with every other task and role in a company, QA teams are no different: Organization is thus key to ensure effective testing.

For any project-based business, measuring the success of a project is essential as it gives an opportunity to assess the strengths, flaws, and potential areas of improvement. Accurately measuring success helps in an effective execution of current and future projects - a factor that is especially important to small and medium firms where each project can make-or-break the company.

Performance reviews are important tools in assessing the productivity and value offered to a company by its employees. They require the use of metrics that can be measured, documented, and compared to get an accurate idea of what an employee/team’s contributions are truly worth. Testers and QA teams, much like all other employees, should also be subject to the scanner to ensure that they are contributing adequately to the development efforts. As such, choosing the right metrics is paramount in ensuring that the QA team's efforts are being duly recognized and measured.

In a traditional software development environment, the development team first builds a feature and then passes it onto QA for testing. The advent of agile software development has however, ushered in a new era of fast paced design, development, and shipping of new features and products. As such, the classic model of separation does not hold sense anymore. For a product or feature to meet the acceptance criteria within the specified time constraints, it is essential that the QA team work continuously in collaboration with the development team to ensure that quality is directly "built into" the product rather than the product being tweaked for improvements *after* completion.

As an adage goes, ‘What you cannot measure, you cannot manage. What you cannot manage, you cannot optimize.’ A lot of Agile driven businesses somehow end up facing the brunt of not being able to prove their usefulness and benefits as they seem to be unaware of what needs to be measured.

Internet of Things (IoT) is the most searched term in Google from the technology circuits globally and is sure to stay as a favorite buzz word for some time to come for the analysts, research groups, technology groups, and enterprise fraternity. A market research report from the business insider in 2015 said that by 2019, across the globe 23 billion devices are expected to be integrated to enable us to live smart. Gartner says 26 billion devices will be connected, and other research firms estimate over 100 billion devices connected to the internet over the next decade.