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Bug severity and bug priority are two closely related notions. Still, these are two different terms describing slightly different sides of a defect. It is essential to distinguish severity and priority for everyone engaged in the development process. A clear understanding of the difference makes it easier to find the best answer to the question “What to fix first?” that can cause tension between QA engineers, developers, and stakeholders. Hopefully, this article will explain the basics and help to clear the air.

What Is Bug Severity?

Bug severity is the extent of the impact a particular defect has on the software under test. The higher effect this defect has on the overall functionality or performance, the higher the severity level is.

Levels of Bug Severity

• Blocker (S1). Such an error makes it impossible to proceed with using or testing the software. For instance, it shuts an application down.
• ...

Device and software fragmentation are among the key factors to pay attention to during the development of a new software product. There’s no guarantee that a website or an app will run smoothly on all the existing devices by default. Even slight differences in hardware and software specifications can significantly affect the end-user experience. Thus, it is essential to run cross-device, cross-platform, and cross-browser checks. All these activities fit under the umbrella term compatibility testing services. Theoretically, the more devices you use for manual software testing, the wider coverage you can achieve. Testing software on more devices should allow finding and eliminating a maximum possible number of defects. This idea sounds reasonable, but it doesn’t always work that way in practice. On the ...

Test automation still causes a lot of debates. Known for its efficiency, software automation testing services can generate highly accurate results, accelerate product time-to-market, improve the team’s overall efficiency, and optimize development expenses in the long run. However, the only way to derive these benefits is to implement AT smartly. What does ‘smartly’ mean in this context? Automation has its optimal point, and exceeding it can have an adverse impact on efficiency. The potential of test automation isn’t infinite, so it is important to automate only what’s really necessary and know when to stop. Automation coverage and the probable benefits vary from product to product. In this article, we’ll explain the basics of smart automation to help you understand this subject a little bit better.

Manual vs Automated Testing

We’ve mentioned in some of the previous blog posts that m...

Bug tracking software helps to streamline the defect fixing process, making development, in general, more efficient. While the ‘why’ question is rather easy to answer, the ‘what’ can give you a real headache. In this article, we’ll share some tips on how to choose a bug tracker. You’ll also find reviews of several tools QA companies frequently use.

What is Bug Tracking Software?

Let’s start with the basics, in case we’ve got managers that don’t have much technical expertise. Bug tracking tools are designed for the systematic recording of defects and convenient management of a bug life cycle. The core features of an average bug tracking system include the following:

• Creation of tickets with a detailed description of bugs.
• Their categorization and prioritization.
• Assigning tickets for particular specialists.
• Tracking defect status at the different stages.
• Easy sea...

It is natural to think about the future, especially during turbulent times. Digitalization that gathers pace globally leads to significant changes in the job market. As technology evolves, professions keep evolving with it. In a decade or so, we may witness a considerable shift of candidate’s priorities and competencies required by employers. We talked with our team to learn what they think about the future of tech professions and, most importantly, the skills QA specialists should possess in the future. Of course, we can’t be a hundred percent sure what comes in ten years and can only make assumptions. Here’s what we concluded.

Hard Skills that Make a Good QA Specialist

When it comes to hard skills, the demands can vary from company to company. Besides, a required skill set also depends on a particular profession. In general, the must-haves for an average candidate are:

• Knowledge of software testing types, methodologies...

The concept of management is used in various contexts due to the many aspects it can regard. In the IT field, risk management is one of the basic terms that should be familiar to specialists. All development activities involve risks. Organizations have to invent effective coping mechanisms to handle those risks. With that said, a standard step-by-step risk management model implies identification, analysis, subsequent assessment, and treatment of the unfavorable conditions. If done right, it results in preventing any kind of negative effect on the processes or their outcomes. Throughout this process, teams involved in a project should communicate with stakeholders – they approve all decisions when certain risks arise. The tricky thing is that, in addition to the general pool, each team and each development phase has a specific set of risks. In this article, we’ll tell a bit about those a software testing company or a ...

Payment systems have become an integral part of a variety of websites and applications. E-commerce is the first thing that comes to mind, but it is not the only one. Just think about services and applications you use regularly. Food delivery, streaming services, e-learning platforms, taxi apps – the majority of them have in-built payment functionality. Whether we are talking about a fully functioning payment system or a payment gateway, it requires testing before the product goes live. In this article, we decided to cover the basics – the importance and particularities of this testing type and the way a functional testing company approaches it. It would be helpful for stakeholders who want to know more about quality assurance for their product and beginner QA specialists in a manual QA testing services company.

Why Is Functional Testi...

During testing, a QA engineer faces lots of documentation and different kinds of artifacts. Checklists, test suits, test scenarios, test plans, test reports, test analysis – these are just some items on the list of documentation a QA engineer should be able to interact with and create. Today, we will tell you about one of those significant artifacts – manual test cases.

A Test Case: Definition and Purpose.

A test case is a set of actions executed to verify a particular feature or functionality of your software application.

The purpose of a test case is to verify that a certain feature works as expected, to confirm that the functionality, UI/UX, and other parameters of a system satisfy all the related standards, guidelines, and customer requirements.

Differences Between a Test Case and a Checklist

We use test cases on complicated projects, for example, where human life depe...

A software development life cycle (SDLC) is a methodology that defines the process of creating a software product. We’ve talked about some of the widely-used SDLC methodologies in one of the previous posts. In this article, we’d like to focus more on different SDLC phases without connection to a particular methodology. It will help to understand better what stages make a development life cycle. Regardless of their sequence and timing, these stages and activities that take place during each remain pretty much the same. A software life cycle starts at the moment the decision to create a software product arises. It ends when the mentioned product stops functioning. In between, a company builds software and maintains it, often developing new features on the way. The phases that make a life cycle are requirements gathering, concept development...