I have said it before and I hate to say it again, but I have been working for 25 years in the software industry, but I have seen fairly small improvements over the years. It has been said that it is a young discipline and therefore it is prone to failure, and everyone needs to learn from their mistakes. Over the years a number of different methods, tools, processes, etc. have been presented to help us improve but still I hear more stories about projects that have quality problems and run over budget and time, compared to projects that succeed to meet their initial frames.

I have worked in the software QA business for more than 20 years, helping clients with software testing and test management primarily. Something that I find interesting is when I can see connections between the IT business and other industries. Today I would like to discuss one of these topics. It’s one that came to mind in the light of a notable medical scandal.

The Tale of The Castle at the Shores of Lake Vättern.

One morning in early August 2021, in the midst of the Corona pandemic, two noble, hopeful and somewhat nervous QA knights met in a parking lot outside a furniture store in Jönköping. They arrived in their graceful gray steeds (also known as “cars”). One of the steeds was a rental vehicle, with a dubious smell from the carpets. The other steed simply reeked of horses. But that did not stop the two knights from embarking upon their new adventure.

I live with my family on a horse farm 150 kilometers from my workplace.

Quality Assurance, or QA testing, is an important step in the software development process. By discovering defects early in the development cycle, QA testing will save time, money, and frustration. Faster and more frequent software releases create room for error, which makes quality assurance a vital part for the success of any fast-paced development. With QA being the core business of SYVE, we are naturally excited to recognize and celebrate World QA Day.

A person that has put his heart into QA over the years is our CEO of System Verification Sweden, Fredrik Grimsberg.

Quality assurance engineers are quite often perceived as master bug hunters. They are fearless, opinionated, and always ready to enable a destructive mindset. However, intentions matter. We intend to support the team in delivering top quality to the end users of our systems. But does it only involve catching bugs?

Have you ever wondered what agile regression testing means and how to do it well in the IT industry? Whenever we introduce new functionality or an improvement, we need to make sure that existing functionality is not broken, which is something we achieve by regression testing. In agile, code updates happen more often so regression testing is of big importance, it must be effective, have good coverage, and prevent shipping any critical bugs to production. Today, our colleague Dalila Terzić, who is in the position of Technical Test Lead and has been in our team for more than four years, will talk about the significance of regression, which is a very important part of the testing process in order to improve your knowledge about the system under the test and have a more effective business in the QA world.

Automating manual tests for a software application helps reduce significant costs of a test cycle where a lot of the test steps involve repetition of the same actions. The prime candidate tests in a test cycle for automation are regression tests and smoke tests. By automating these you save a lot of resources and mainly the test cycle duration.

Each framework for your business has its benefits, and not every framework can be considered a "one size fits all" solution. When it comes to choosing which framework to use and why, you may come to a dilemma as to which to choose, and for this very reason we are here to help and better explain this educational theme. Our colleague Omer, who had the chance to work as a QA on a variety of projects and in a variety of teams within our company for a long time now, wrote this excellent blog that will guide you on how an organization or team evaluates what methodology and framework is the best fit for them and their client needs. Omer has been with us for more than three years, and through different ways of working and different approaches, he has seen how everything affects the teams and their deliverables, and he wants to share his experience now through this quality blog with you.

Explaining how testing works requires more than a blog post but in order to explain better how testing functions to an audience interested in working in the QA industry, our colleagues with many years of experience have prepared step-by-step situations and stories that will undoubtedly benefit each of you. This time, we got one of the crucial things for all future IT technicians in the field of quality assurance if you want to produce admirable work with good results.