Quality Engineering is a disciplined approach to improving quality from start to finish through the entire software development lifecycle. It is the pursuit of achieving high quality standards across the management, development, operation and maintenance of IT systems.

Functional Testing is crucial for identifying the majority of issues in software systems yet it is often implemented inefficiently, leading to costly delays. At PTP, we emphasise the importance of understanding organisational risk thresholds and meticulous planning to avoid late-stage rework and unnecessary expenses.

Test Automation is the engineering concept of using a tool (code, low code or no-code) to produce automated workflow that produces the testing result that otherwise would have required a manual tester to do the same clicks/text input. The automation allows for this output to be run frequently, cheaply and in any stage of software development, or environment the customer chooses. The automation needs to be maintained to remain effective.

The best way to do performance testing is to build it into your design and development process from the start. Most teams don’t do this, instead they focus on building functionality and hope performance testing provides a rubber stamp. Yet, as we know ‘hope’ isn’t a strategy for success, which is something teams frequently discover too late.

Data comes in many forms and in most businesses there are massive amounts of it fragmented across many sources. Some are structured (ie. queryable) such as databases, a lot tends to be semi-structured (eg. excel spreadsheets, xml) and a huge amount tends to be unstructured (eg. log files, images, videos). In the past, businesses made decisions emotionally with data. Today, businesses can now perform complex analysis and predict patterns and trends.

AI Testing is the concept of testing Discriminative or Generative AI systems or functions to ensure that outcomes provided by these systems and algorithms meets the expected tolerances and rules expected. Depending on the situation, it may also entail testing for levels of bias, concept drift, hallucination and relevance. It can also apply to conformance to policy, user restrictions, data leakage and other security specific concerns.

A commonly neglected type of testing are what we refer to as the ‘illities’ - they are a group of testing that end with ‘illities’ in their name- such as accessibility (for users with disabilities), useability, compatibility, interoperability (there are many more). You may have tested changes you’ve made functionally and they work perfectly, but without testing the ‘ilities’ you have no way of knowing whether it will work for all your users, on their devices, or with their cultural background or language which may ultimately determine whether the change will work for your customer.

Mobile testers are a hybridisation of functional testing and specific non-functional testing methodologies- namely compatibility, interoperability and useability testing. Compatibility is about ensuring that all changes work on all targeted devices and operating systems. Interoperability is the testing of a version of a thing against different versions of dependencies eg. different versions of an operating system. Usability refers to the testing of how usable a change from a users viewpoint factoring in localisation concerns and language.

Our team of consultants are always happy to chat further on making the complex, simple. Contact us today to talk more.