QA Mentor: Accelerating Software Testing
With applications becoming more and more complex in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, software testing has grown to become a crucial component of the software development lifecycle. Moreover, with Digital Transformation now disrupting the way software applications are developed and amplifying the need to build better software testing capabilities, the patterns, methodologies,and tools involved in testing are also evolving with the changing testing needs. Among these methodologies, Agile Testing and DevOps have been the key drivers for growth in the software testing market, while Test Automation has emerged as the ideal approach to rapidly recognize defects and test fixes, without decelerating organizations. However, even with these advancements, testing brings its own complexities where the lack of resources, lack of communication, inability to carry out complete testing, ensuring test coverage across different geographical locations and performing regression tests all present challenges. Additionally, many organizations are still hesitant to pick test automation over traditional manual testing as it entails large expenses and often requires sellers to provide custom-fit solutions to meet the needs of every business setting. Acknowledging these different challenges and endeavoring to address them, New York-headquartered QA Mentor steps forward as an independent Software Testing company that brings cost-effective, quality testing frameworks that can ensure the overall success of its clients.
Incepted in 2010, QA Mentor is an ISO 27001:2013 and ISO 9001:2015 certified independent Software Testing Company that leverages over 250 global QA resources in 8 different countries to offer more than 30 QA testing services across all time zones. In alignment with its mission to provide affordable and superior Quality Assurance and Software Testing services, while maintaining complete professionalism with its clients and employees, the company has been focused on bringing quality to the forefront of software development and has emerged as a prominent figure in Quality Assurance. Consequently, QA Mentor has created a strong global presence with operations across the United States, UK, France, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and India with an expansive solution portfolio that includes unique product propositions ranging from a Crowd sourcing Platform with a pool of 12,000 Crowd sourced testers to a Test Management platform, as well as QA Education imparted through E-learning and Corporate Training. “In a short span of just eight years, QA Mentor has grown from 1 to 250+ resources and has established a prominent global presence across 8 locations world-wide,” affirms Ruslan Desyatnikov, Founder & CEO, QA Mentor. “Our time tested engagement model along with an experienced team of highly driven people, subject matter experts, proven processes, best practices and established tools, frameworks and alliances, sets us apart from other software testing firms,” he goes on to add. QA Mentor’s expansive portfolio includes 30 distinct Quality Assurance services, some of which are core QA services such as Manual Test Design and Execution, QA Performance and Capacity Planning, QA Performance Engineering and Optimization, Security Testing as well as other services including Agile QA services, QA Audit and Process Improvement, Test Automation Framework Design, Test Cases Coverage Review, Business Analysis and Requirement Engineering, Business Assurance Testing Service, and QA Corporate Training and E-learning.
Innovative Approach to Testing
With software testers encountering challenges in detecting the maximum number of defects across the maximum area of applications, QA Mentor adopts a 'Shift Left' approach, where the company begins the testing process at a very early stage in the project lifecycle,i.e. the requirement gathering phase. Believing this to be a unique and innovative approach, QA Mentor pairs BAs with QA resources to tightly control the quality right from the beginning. In order to accomplish this, the company offers a specialized Test Case Coverage service, which has been designed to identify gaps in the Test Case coverage of its clients, from static testing all the way until product validation. QA Mentor thus initiates testing from the requirements gathering phase, where the company inspects the complete set of requirements by employing its static testing methodology. Built through a series of checklists, this methodology has been specifically designed to address and identify gaps in the requirements documentation, which can potentially grow into serious defects at the application level. The QA Mentor Testing Service Providers focus extensively on identifying the gaps and ensuring that all the gaps are addressed and fixed within the requirements documentation. Furthermore, the company also undertakes a trace ability methodology to ensure that every single requirement is traceable, has the associated test cases and sufficient coverage of the test cases through testing execution, to avoid the leakage of defects.“Testing of requirements right from the requirement gathering phase has helped us dramatically improve application quality, as we believe that a good input guarantees a good output. This methodology also allows us to ensure that the requirements are solid, complete, comprehensive, testable and traceable, which in turn sets a standard for the quality to be much better on the whole,” explains Ruslan.
Helping Organizations Adapt to Agile Methodologies and Automation
Agile Testing is now witnessing an upsurge in its adoption with many
organizations looking to move from traditional waterfall methods and implement agile methodologies, as they can bring a quicker time-to-market. However, switching to agile systems can be quite daunting for enterprises as it requires testers to be trained to approach testing differently, ask the right questions and implement efficient processes without slowing down the current development of the organization. Meeting these demands, QA Mentor equips such organizations with Agile Transformation QA services that are designed to adapt QA Agile Methodologies for companies trying to make the transition. These services encompass new techniques and means of obtaining test requirements to build test cases in a faster and more efficient manner. The QA team also offers its assistance and guidance to help organizations find the right Agile approach and tools, automate their agile projects, keep up with regression testing and build continuous integration into their overall process.
Furthermore, with the industry now inclined towards automation, QA Mentor believes it to be of great significance and an enabler of agile implementations as these implementations are very quick and require a faster turnaround time in terms of testing. QA Mentor thus provides Test Automation Framework Design Services to help enterprise testing teams standardize their automation process into a single entity across the entire organization. With the ability to support tools such as UFT, Ranorex, TestComplete, Silk Test, Selenium and other top automation tools in the market today, these frameworks can be utilized by any body in the QA team to operate and execute automation scripts more quickly and easily. QA Mentor has also been focused on building strategies and methodologies to support Big Data initiatives and IoT projects, from a development and testing perspective.
Strengthening Application Defences with Security Testing
When it comes to Security Testing, QA Mentor employs a methodology that encapsulates a combination of the best practices, testing variants and tools, along with a proactive approach, as opposed to a defensive one. The company’s portfolio of Security testing offerings includes Security Hardening, Patch Management, Identity Management, Penetration Testing, Functional Security Testing, Network Security Testing and Vulnerability Assessments,as well as ongoing and continuous monitoring so as to prevent any security related threats. In order to implement these solutions, QA Mentor has set up its own Security Testing Practice that comprises of Security Testing Professionals and Engineers that keep themselves abreast of the emerging trends and technologies, to attack application defenses to find loopholes and weaknesses and combat every security threat. The company also has a number of open source tools as well as enterprise level tools, to support various security testing aspects, particularly manual security testing, where major problems are being identified.“While these tools are beneficial, it is essential to come up with different techniques to conduct security penetration testing manually, and for this reason, our security testing practices are aligned with the latest tools and solutions in the market, as well as our own unique security testing methodology,” reveals Ruslan.
In a period of over eight years, QA Mentor has grown by leaps and bounds and has distinguished itself in this domain owing to its quality testing services, innovative engagement models, and vast domain expertise. Leveraging this position, the company is en route to launching its 'Business Process Management Service' with a unique and proprietary ‘Business Essential Software Testing (BEST) framework’, which have been designed to bring a paradigm shift in the traditional software testing approach. Furthermore, with the advent of AI, IOT enabled connected devices and Blockchain, the company also intends to build a resource pool dedicated to these niche services, to address the growing demand for them. QA Mentor is also set to expand its presence into Pakistan and the Philippines in the upcoming future.
Successful Automation of Testing Cycles
Having catered to a wide range of testing and quality assurance services for an expansive clientele of fortune 500 enterprises,QA Mentor has a number of success stories under its wing, one among which is its engagement with a Global Bank. The bank, which required the automation of 12000 manual test cases that periodically consumed an execution time frame of six weeks and a team of 23 QA professionals to complete the regression testing cycle, was able to accomplish this faster with the help of QA Mentor’s services.
In just 15 months, QA Mentor was not only able to automate almost 85 percent of the regression testing repository, but over five thousand hours of manual execution was reduced to only four days, there by allowing the client's manual resources time to focus on more productive operations. Having deployed a team of eight automation engineers and scaling down to only three automation engineers for maintenance and support functions, QA Mentor helped the bank achieve its target while also facilitating a short turnaround time and instant ROI generation.
In a Short Span of Just Eight Year, QA Mentor has Grown from 1 to 250+ Resource and has Established a Prominent Global Presence Across 8 Location Worldwide
Furthermore, with the industry now inclined towards automation, QA Mentor believes it to be of great significance and an enabler of agile implementations as these implementations are very quick and require a faster turnaround time in terms of testing. QA Mentor thus provides Test Automation Framework Design Services to help enterprise testing teams standardize their automation process into a single entity across the entire organization. With the ability to support tools such as UFT, Ranorex, TestComplete, Silk Test, Selenium and other top automation tools in the market today, these frameworks can be utilized by any body in the QA team to operate and execute automation scripts more quickly and easily. QA Mentor has also been focused on building strategies and methodologies to support Big Data initiatives and IoT projects, from a development and testing perspective.
Strengthening Application Defences with Security Testing
When it comes to Security Testing, QA Mentor employs a methodology that encapsulates a combination of the best practices, testing variants and tools, along with a proactive approach, as opposed to a defensive one. The company’s portfolio of Security testing offerings includes Security Hardening, Patch Management, Identity Management, Penetration Testing, Functional Security Testing, Network Security Testing and Vulnerability Assessments,as well as ongoing and continuous monitoring so as to prevent any security related threats. In order to implement these solutions, QA Mentor has set up its own Security Testing Practice that comprises of Security Testing Professionals and Engineers that keep themselves abreast of the emerging trends and technologies, to attack application defenses to find loopholes and weaknesses and combat every security threat. The company also has a number of open source tools as well as enterprise level tools, to support various security testing aspects, particularly manual security testing, where major problems are being identified.“While these tools are beneficial, it is essential to come up with different techniques to conduct security penetration testing manually, and for this reason, our security testing practices are aligned with the latest tools and solutions in the market, as well as our own unique security testing methodology,” reveals Ruslan.
In a period of over eight years, QA Mentor has grown by leaps and bounds and has distinguished itself in this domain owing to its quality testing services, innovative engagement models, and vast domain expertise. Leveraging this position, the company is en route to launching its 'Business Process Management Service' with a unique and proprietary ‘Business Essential Software Testing (BEST) framework’, which have been designed to bring a paradigm shift in the traditional software testing approach. Furthermore, with the advent of AI, IOT enabled connected devices and Blockchain, the company also intends to build a resource pool dedicated to these niche services, to address the growing demand for them. QA Mentor is also set to expand its presence into Pakistan and the Philippines in the upcoming future.
Successful Automation of Testing Cycles
Having catered to a wide range of testing and quality assurance services for an expansive clientele of fortune 500 enterprises,QA Mentor has a number of success stories under its wing, one among which is its engagement with a Global Bank. The bank, which required the automation of 12000 manual test cases that periodically consumed an execution time frame of six weeks and a team of 23 QA professionals to complete the regression testing cycle, was able to accomplish this faster with the help of QA Mentor’s services.
In just 15 months, QA Mentor was not only able to automate almost 85 percent of the regression testing repository, but over five thousand hours of manual execution was reduced to only four days, there by allowing the client's manual resources time to focus on more productive operations. Having deployed a team of eight automation engineers and scaling down to only three automation engineers for maintenance and support functions, QA Mentor helped the bank achieve its target while also facilitating a short turnaround time and instant ROI generation.
