9 Ways Drupal Quality Assurance Saved Projects

Drupal Quality Assurance (QA) will keep things moving by isolating problems. 

Problems you didn’t even know you had.

Without the right QA engineers, your project teams will suffer through unforeseen setbacks and expensive pitfalls that could’ve been avoided. The idea that “developers can do all” has come to pass—your developers aren’t only unschooled when it comes to QA, let's face it: they’re dangerously biased. It’s not their fault... it’s just not their job.

What Drupal quality assurance offers for our clients and us is reliability, confidence, and a faster time to market (TTM).

Here are nine specific ways they do this; 9 needs that might apply to an upcoming project:

1. API Automation

By automating API testing using Runscope and integrating it with a dynamic communications program (like Slack) can save projects through catching issues right when they come up. Drupal quality assurance specialists can take ownership of setting up Automated API testing so the team can build test suites and verify based on expected HTTP response. The results are thereby published on social channels, and a daily performance email is triggered to the team. If you’ve got an API malfunction, you want it dealt with soon—like yesterday.

2. Mobile Usability

The QA team plays a significant role in mobile testing, where a considerable amount of efforts and fresh ideas are needed to test a native or responsive app.

• To test responsive applications, specialists can employ simulators like browser stack, responsinator, and others.
• To test native application, QA Engineers put .APK ( for Android) and .IPA ( for IOS) to work and can check the right platform to get accurate results.
• To test on real device, the team can connect iPhone with iTunes and drag in the IPA file.

3. Migration

Migration should never be done without some Quality Assurance, regardless of the project. Maintaining the quality and the integrity of data is incredibly important. Any change related to data calls for a formal strategy for testing. For Drupal based migration projects, depending on the size, teams should expect an abundant amount of data that will have to be migrated to the production site.

When first approaching this, you need data quality testing and administered tests on the target system’s functionality with the migrated data. What this does is to help improve data quality, eliminate redundant or obsolete information, and match requirements to the new system.

4. Regression

When modifying the code, there are sometimes unexpected side effects that bring in new bugs or an unreasonable performance downgrade. During projects, when developers are working on performance issues, QA should be tasked with building a Regression Suite with major scenarios covered.

This testing suite can be put in a project management system (like Pivotal Tracker, JIRA, or Curamine) so it can be executed every time a Regression Cycle is run This can save a hefty amount of time and will produce a higher quality end product. Automating the regression suite using Behat and Selenium is also an effective way to performing regression through continuous integration.

5. Site Performance

A website’s performance is one of the top things decision makers in a business need to care about. When launching a new site, updating, or migrating, QA engineers will help isolate behavior issues holding up the site’s speed and other performance errors.

This check is handled by the team with load and stress tests. The results of this testing are put to work to prevent post production issues, if and when too many users access the site.

During load testing, Drupal quality assurance service providers need to test and analyze how many concurrent users can access the site and perform transactions (or a different interaction prompted by the user). The variation in behavior and response time needs to be noted.

For example, if the website stops responding and a blank page is displayed when a load of more than 100 concurrent users is applied, you want to know this sooner rather than later. There are times when the QA team might have to suggest an increase in server capacity.

Working with a QA developer to stress test your website's performance can mean the difference between a website that is sturdy like a rock, and a website that crumples like a piece of paper under the force of traffic.

6. User Acceptance

When working with one of our clients during User Acceptance Testing, we discovered there was misalignment between the developers and the customer tester's understanding of requirements. We quickly identified that we needed more infrastructure around testing against these kinds of requirements, so the testers wrote acceptance criteria which the developers could use during development.

Leveraging an automated testing platform, or performing their own manual QA, the developers would execute the test cases while performing unit testing before merging the feature up for QA and UAT. Without this realignment prompted by QA, the client would have continued to log UAT bugs and the delivery timeline would have kept on increasing.

7. Spotting & Squashing Bugs

Bugs are tricky and time consuming. Identifying and dealing with them quickly takes practice. We ran into a problem once when our developers were assigning logged bugs to testers by marking them as invalid. Testers would again replicate the bug and assign it back to developers.

These concerns don’t happen anymore and it’s because we’ve optimized how our QA team operates. While logging a bug, testers should add seriously detailed bug replication steps and helpful evidences like logs and screenshots. If you don’t have a QA team handling this, you might experience a back and forth when it comes to bug assignment. 

8. Accurate User Stories

When a Drupal quality assurance team first introduces agile to new projects, during initial sprints it might come up that the way user stories are being selected is incorrect. What QA helps do is to identify the dependency of each user story; the team plays a significant role in sprint planning. Without ensuring quality and the timely delivery of each sprint, the product’s quality suffers.

9. Required Site Features

The team needs to be aware of the entire system as a whole, to analyze without bias, and to help developers do their magic by keeping end goals in perspective. During integration testing, they play a vital role when functionality across modules needs to be developed.

White box testing performed by QA can help uncover unimplemented parts of the specification—missing requirements. Engineers can also keep an eye on code coverage via data flow testing, statement coverage, and decision coverage.

Drupal Quality Assurance Can Cover It.

These examples of how a Drupal QA team can save projects might apply to your upcoming site build, migration, or another Drupal initiative. Our clients value the work our QA augmentees provide, and not just for the nine reasons above.