Get Testing Right with Orasi
Software quality remains a challenge. As software teams move toward agile practices and as mobile apps become more strategic to software strategies, toolsets and processes have to evolve. More than 1,800 software organizations around the world rely on Orasi’s on-site training programs, software consulting services, and the best-of-breed solutions to improve their product quality outcomes.
“Orasi is laser-focused on software quality,” said Jean Suplick, solutions architect at Orasi. “We work as partners with our customers so they can achieve their unique goals.”
Orasi is a preferred provider of software testing services that include test management, test automation, enterprise testing, environment hosting, and mobile testing technology. The company consistently helps customers successfully implement and integrate software testing environments that reduce the cost and risks of software failures. From initial implementations to enterprise rollouts, Orasi accelerates the return on testing investments. Its services span implementation, functional testing, performance testing, security, and mobile. Training programs include best practices and product-centric instruction.
Enable Agile Testing
Many development teams have embraced agile practices but testing and business analyst teams must also modernize their work styles to meet ever shorter release cycles.
“Software quality assurance teams are trying to figure out how to become more agile,” said Joe Schulz, area vice president at Orasi. “They’re looking for help and advice about how to get there, how to retool, and how to adjust their processes in general.”
More shops realize that test-driven development is an important aspect of agile practices. Instead of writing code and throwing it over the wall to testers, developers are writing tests, writing code, and then testing that code before they develop more code.
“Test-driven development represents a huge shift. Before, everyone worked in a silo,” said Jeff Tatelman, director of professional services. “Whether you’re building mobile, client-server, Internet, or other applications headed in those directions, it’s important to do best practices right.”
Automation and continuous integration are also critical to agile delivery schedules, and more organizations are moving toward continuous delivery to further speed their release cycles. As software teams move from manual testing practices to automated testing practices, and from major releases to continuous integration and continuous deployment, they often face tooling and process challenges that are difficult to overcome with existing knowledge and skill sets. Orasi assesses a client’s current state, provides direction on best practices, creates a test strategy, and sets up (and sometimes manages or hosts) the test environment which may be on-premise or in the cloud. It also offers training classes on writing better requirements, testing best practices, and continuous delivery.
“Requirements management is key to developing applications and tracing requirements to tests,” said Tatelman. “The testing best practices class touches on requirements as well as testing concepts throughout the entire lifecycle of a project whether it’s agile, waterfall, or iterative. The continuous delivery classes are process classes presented from an agile perspective.”
Ensure Mobile App Quality
Mobile app users are notoriously impatient. If an app doesn’t work as expected, it’s either deleted or ignored. Many user experience issues can be traced back to inadequate testing or less-than-optimal testing practices or environments. With Orasi’s assistance, QA teams can get access to the testing environments and best practices they require to ensure predictable results.
“Our customers aren’t always sure which products they should be using, what best practices they should adopt, or how they should prioritize their mobile testing efforts,” said Schulz. “Embracing mobile causes a paradigm shift in development and the interesting side-effect is that shops are bifurcating into old and new processes.”
The “old” processes include waterfall-like design as well as centralized IT and business analyst functions. Meanwhile, the mobile team is usually operating in a completely different fashion. Increasingly, the disparate teams have to resolve their differences.
“We look at process limitations, what tools would make sense at each step, and develop a full-blown method that includes steps and technologies,” said Schulz. “In the case of mobile testing, we may include hosting and deployment of the mobile testing environment and implement it on site or in a public or private cloud. We provide mobile application testing training and implementation consulting.”
Defining the mobile test environments requires an assessment of the devices, operating systems, and other device and environmental factors. Orasi also helps clients decide what they should test and what other test cases should be considered.
For example, Orasi helped a regional bank with a mobile application assess technology, select vendors and solutions, build the implementation plan, and run testing on-site. It also hosted the necessary mobile equipment and provided operations support. Schulz said the bank realized 300 percent ROI in the first 18 months and a 2.5X productivity increase compared to the web projects it had done previously.
“With agile and mobile, customers are facing a whole new set of challenges,” said Tatelman. “We help them get from where they are to where they want to go.”
Learn more at www.orasi.com.
