Three ways to test your digital products
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Applications must now interact with an increasing variety of systems and software. These two routes of development have significantly lowered the effectiveness of traditional ways of software testing.
The first of these traditions was automation. Automated testing is the use of specialised software to test other software. It’s an idea that has been around for a long time. Various tools operating within an automation framework do bug testing within target applications. The problem is that, no matter how hard anyone may try, the automation environment is not the real world. System/integration testing can reduce this problem, but it can’t eliminate it. And Application Under Test (AUT) can also compensate, but test scripts can’t always address every eventuality. Ultimately, it comes down to GIGO, Garbage In equals Garbage Out.
Manual software testing is the second traditional method. While it can compensate for the drawbacks of automation, it has problems of its own. Manual testing can be very expensive, both in terms of money and time. It can lack accuracy and it requires direct briefing of the software tester, which opens the possibility of human mistakes. Also, manual testing isn’t practical for performance testing and quite simply doesn’t work well by itself on large scale projects.
Agile testing was developed to handle these problems by creating an interactive framework that doesn’t force the application to fit the test but rather develops a testing environment that more accurately reflects the real world. Bugwolf has taken this concept to a new level by introducing gamification, where highly vetted software testers compete to improve the quality of an application. Gamification also means that product testing is made with minimal prior briefing, thereby eliminating prior assumptions that can get in the way of successful testing.
As digital products are increasingly required to do more and to interface more deeply, there may come a time when Bugwolf’s approach will become the industry standard for software quality testing.