How burstable testing benefits modern apps

Fatima Wahab , Fatima is a movie junkie and technology enthusiast who aspires to be a published author.

July 30th, 2020

Modern apps are lightweight, built on microservices architecture, and routinely updated through agile development practices. Through them, software solution providers can deliver high-quality value to their customers and users in a more impactful way. One way this is done is by focusing product improvement efforts on a feature set that users find most useful, or an area of the app that users mention as useful but buggy.

Customers are not shy when it comes to sharing a bad app-driven experience. When shipping such modular improvements or bug fixes, and making frequent releases, it is important to ensure the quality of the delivery every time. This is where burstable testing – a key concept of networked testing – plays a pivotal role.

Burstable testing in an approach where teams of highly skilled testers swarm the app surface over a defined period of time to test a piece of shippable software. For modern apps, this offers highly effective and economical value-delivery. Breaking it down, we can highlight several benefits of strategically integrating burstable testing within a software product’s lifecycle.

High Skill Focus

Burstable testing requires teams of highly skilled testers with wide domain knowledge and rich usability experience. As part of a networked testing approach, these expert testers have a substantial background in testing different applications, so they gain an affinity for app best practices. Furthermore, a large portion of these testers stay consistent run-to-run while a smaller number of new testers are rotated to provide a fresh set of eyes. What this means for each specific testing task on a modern app is deeper testing, comprehensive perspective, and more resources per testing hour.

Agile testing windows

Burstable testing allows organizations to use multi-time zone teams of testers to cover gaps in between regular working hours (overnight or during the weekend). As a result, development teams have sizable and actionable feedback to work on soon as they are available on the next working day. Software companies are able to test the quality of their shippable code at various stages of development and make early decisions based on immediately available testing results. This testing flexibility can give software companies a significant edge when they are looking to release a hotfix for a particularly critical bug or a major feature release.

Economically Smart

Companies leveraging networked testing techniques such as burstable testing have no need to pay for idle QA personnel – capacity is available on-demand, when necessary. This creates real economic value, especially when paired with the benefits of agile testing windows. Imagine the cost of having large in-house testing teams on rotating shifts to test overnight and/or on the weekends… The effort and resources needed would be absolutely huge, well beyond the testing budget of many small to medium-sized organizations. As for larger enterprises, it’s almost impossible to keep up with today’s lightning-fast app release cycles, maintain quality and stay competitive without augmenting in-house QA capabilities.

Timeboxed Testing

Burstable testing is timeboxed, generally broken into (but not limited to) 1-2 hour chunks. To optimize testing efficiency and effectiveness, testing is divided into short assignments and shared with a wider team of networked testers – this provides broad test coverage (in terms of devices, network, platform, location, mindset, etc.) while significantly reducing time.

Burstable testing is a successful approach to enhancing the quality of modern app delivery. It builds greater quality in the app release cycle and offers a wealth of testing insights to enhance the usability of the app itself – at significant economic benefits.

Check out how Networked Testing compares to in-house, outsourced, and traditional crowdsourced testing approaches.