Top 10 features offered by leading software testing companies

With the world embracing more digital tools to create new efficiencies, businesses that want to stay relevant in the market need their offerings to remain dynamic, optimized for users, and pristine quality.

Since it’s often not possible to build, maintain, and enable technology alone, partnering with a software testing company is a great solution for continued success. But among so many options, how can you be confident that the software testing company you want to work with is the best?

Getting into the capabilities and features of a prospective QA partner can help you move forward. Cutting through the advertising smokescreen of many technologies, this post will help you focus on the ten best features of leading software testing companies.

1: Manual Testing

There’s no better tester than a human with hands-on experience. Manual testing involves real people performing runs on a mobile app or website, looking for bugs and performance issues.

Manual testing usually results in writing test cases that include quality assurance (QA) assessments, reporting bugs and/or user experience problems. This feedback session is essential, and when someone with extensive knowledge performs it, you get detail-oriented results that are creative and well communicated. As a complement to automation, manual testing leverages more complex exploratory, usability, and localization testing. 

With manual testing, you can collaborate with another team to get the tests you need, how you need them.

2. Performance Assessment

This feature ensures that your software’s performance is optimized. Companies who test performance often will include various smaller tests to ensure that everything is running as it should, such as:

• Load tests, which evaluate how the system works when handling multiple users.
• Stress tests, which evaluate how the system will behave when put under extreme loads. 
• Spike testing, when you test short spurts of work on the system. 
• Endurance tests, which will ensure that your software can handle extended work. 
• Scalability, which checks if the system can be expanded. 

3: Automation Testing

Automation and automated processes are ubiquitous in today’s market, but maintaining automation over time can be incredibly time consuming. 

While companies shy away from automation because they lack the necessary resources to maintain and update the technology, a software testing partner that features automation testing can solve the issue.

When you have a suite of automated tests, it means that you have safety protocols in place that will wave down any issues when rolling out new updates.  

Ensuring that your automation processes work correctly can save your company hours by avoiding unnecessary work. In short, you’re less likely to have to worry about whether your newest addition might cause a regression.

4: Real-Device Testing

When testing web and mobile apps, software partners should ensure dynamic offerings across operating systems, network connections, browsers, devices, and a global user base. 

Software development companies have two primary options for device testing — real and virtual. Virtual device testing solutions like simulators or emulators are great for early-stage testing, while real device testing is crucial to ensure an app’s success before it gets into the hands of end-users. 

Often, utilizing a combination of testing options produces the best end product. Software testing partners that feature real device testing can cover a larger range of devices, users, and network realities.

5: Security Testing

With any web or mobile app, website, or online content, there’s a risk that a third party will gain access to your servers and sensitive information if security systems aren’t in place. 

By hiring a software testing company to test all vulnerable access points and block them, you can be sure your employees’ and consumers’ information is safe. 

Software testing partners that feature security testing often utilize the safest, most secure standards internally, which can help strengthen your trust in another company.

6: QA Services

Quality Assurance (QA) services help you understand that the product you’re delivering is up to standard as well as giving you a concrete idea of your product’s life cycle. 

This is done by ensuring that you monitor every development stage and give accurate feedback.

7: Agile Consulting

With agile consultants’ and managed app testing services, you’re offered an individual or team of experts who can set up, as well as audit, your testing processes. 

This means they will be able to start optimizing your workflow and testing, and in the software world, it is essential to keep evolving with requirements and times.

8: Backup Coverage

Partnering with a software company means adding additional staff to your repertoire, and the best partners ensure backup coverage.

Runs, testing timelines, and release deadlines don’t shift when freelancers take time off. Software companies should employ a global staff of freelancers and work teams to ensure quality checks are completed and run during holidays and time off.

9: Regression Testing

With any digital service or offering, eventually you will start to see wear and tear. As products, offerings, and websites are continually updating and iterated, software testing companies should offer a metric of secure regression testing.

Having regression testing in place is an essential service that ensures freelance testers can log frequent defects, functionalities evident to users, and cases that verify the product’s core features.

10: Payments Testing

For e-commerce enterprises, ensuring that your payment methods are secure and work properly is crucial for your company. While payments testing is a specific feature, leading software testing companies also integrate other types of testing to verify payment channels. Look for:

• Functionality testing
• Integration testing
• Performance testing
• Security testing 
• Usability testing 
• Compatibility testing 
• Location testing
• Localization testing 

Opening up your QA strategy to include a software testing partner may feel like a risky maneuver, but limiting your product’s growth, or worse yet, releasing a broken app to your customers, is even riskier.

Diving into the heart of features can empower businesses to make the right decisions. While you may not utilize all ten of the features listed above, seeing these top capabilities offered by a prospective vendor should be a vote of confidence.