Integrated Functional Testing: The New View of Quality

Do you remember your parents’ cars, long before the days of “smart cars”? Back in those days, car drivers couldn’t quickly or easily understand the overall health of their automobile in the way they can today. Why? For one, all the critical data points were contained in different places.

Sure, those older cars’ dashboards displayed a speedometer and the amount of gas left in the tank. But they didn’t provide deeper insight into the car’s health, such as tire air pressure. Most of the time, drivers would find out they had a flat tire after starting their drive.

Today’s cars provide all that information upfront in an easy-to-read dashboard. As soon as you turn on the engine, you’ll know how many miles until you run out of gas, the outside temperature and if a tire is low on air. This empowers drivers with the information they need to know before setting off on the road.

Many organizations face a similar problem with software quality — they are unable to make efficient, strategic and data-driven decisions on when to release software. In other words, too many companies are releasing software with significant issues, and they don’t even know it.

By evaluating manual and automated testing results separately, teams receive only a portion of the testing results at a time. These siloed results don’t allow businesses to easily and efficiently make informed decisions on when software is ready to release.

This is where Applause’s Integrated Functional Testing (IFT) comes in.

What is Applause’s Integrated Functional Testing?

Manual and automated testing are essential components of your testing strategy. However, when manual and automated testing work in separate paths, you get unnecessary redundancies and are unable to maximize test coverage.

Integrated Functional Testing combines both manual and automated testing approaches into one cohesive and holistic solution. This is designed to help teams accelerate development velocity and increase digital quality. Applause is the first — and only — testing services company to offer this coordinated solution, as well as a single dashboard to view all results.

Integrated Functional Testing combines both manual and automated testing approaches into one cohesive and holistic solution.

Our crowd-powered manual testing can fill the coverage gaps of automated testing, rapidly validate true automation failures and provide a real-world perspective. In the meantime, test automation provides the reliability and speed to get your releases to market faster.

With Integrated Functional Testing, your tests are strategically architected to capitalize on the benefits of both approaches (manual and automated) to ensure maximum test coverage and greater efficiencies.

This new product suite combines manual and automated testing in a way that’s never previously been available for organizations. This will enable teams to speed up their development, improve digital quality and make data-driven decisions.

“Because Priceline is a world leader in travel, our customers expect and trust us to provide an exceptional experience, where they can easily find and book great travel deals,” said Eric Goldberg, VP of Quality Assurance at Priceline. “Since we are constantly making improvements to that experience and our underlying systems, having an effective quality assurance program is essential. The new Applause Integrated Functional Testing approach helps us accomplish this in an efficient and scalable manner.”

How can IFT help?

The benefits of Integrated Functional Testing are felt throughout the SDLC.

Maximize testing coverage

By combining your manual and automated testing into a cohesive and comprehensive solution, Integrated Functional Testing will help organizations maximize their testing coverage and ensure that Product, Engineering and QA teams have a shared view and can trust the tests results. Your results are aggregated into one dashboard to streamline workflows. This reduces the burdens and added time of working across multiple systems to get an aggregated view of quality.

By combining your manual and automated testing into a cohesive and comprehensive solution, Integrated Functional Testing will help organizations maximize their testing coverage and ensure that Product, Engineering and QA teams have a shared view and can trust the tests results

Integrated Functional Testing also maximizes coverage and speed, resulting in faster development velocity — while improving quality. Our solution integrates seamlessly with your CI/CD pipeline to enable continuous feedback for a more Agile process.

By combining manual and automated testing in an integrated solution, you can also highlight bugs found in manual testing to optimize automation scripts, thus improving your automated testing coverage over time.

Delineate product failures from false positives

Our integrated results and reporting also enable you to understand the overall health of a specific product feature or functionality at any point in time. You can easily understand whether a failure is truly critical or just a minor bug, and get a clear view of product quality. With this, you can better evaluate the risk of releasing a specific feature or build into the world.

For example, if an automation test fails, the team can immediately send the test to the crowd for manual functional testing to validate if it’s a true product failure. That eliminates concerns over false positives.

Imagine driving a car now without a modern dashboard. That’s the kind of impact that IFT will be for organizations — once you have this level of insight, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without it.