QA Strategy

Learn the practical frameworks and practices that’ll help you build a strong foundation for your teams's QA strategy.

Learn how to differentiate between various QA testing tools, how to decide which ones you need, and 30+ options to consider.

Learn why startups usually don’t need to (and often shouldn’t) hire a QA person to improve product quality.

This guide to software regression testing answers the top FAQs about software regression testing.

In this post, we'll cover the most common types of web application testing, which ones to prioritize, and tools to use.

Many quality assurance metrics evaluate QA activities rather than results. These are the 5 most helpful QA metrics.

Learn the basics of agile regression testing and five strategies to streamline your software testing process.

Learn how to write a software test plan. Get started with our practical guide and free template.

Conventional approaches to QA are broken. Here's a better way.

The landscape of software testing is changing. Speed and quality are no longer seen as opposing forces.

Building a high-quality product takes teamwork. Maintaining a best-in-class product while continually developing high-quality features and giving a stellar customer experience, takes a quality-driven culture. We teamed up with Invotra in this new guide, Building a Culture of Quality: How Teams Can Use Quality to Achieve Business Goals, to explore the strategy behind building a […]

If you’re looking to level up your QA career, redefine your testing strategy or just make a few friends in the industry, heading to one of the QA industry conferences can be a great way to kickstart your goals. But it can be hard to decide which ones will provide the most value. Here are […]

We’re halfway through January and today is Ditch Your New Year’s Resolution Day. While our personal resolutions might already be losing steam, our professional plans for better software quality, more efficient processes and faster delivery timelines are just getting underway. In this year’s World Quality Report, QA leaders from around the world and across various industries contributed […]

Agile testing is a software practice designed to apply the principles of agile software development to the QA testing process. Learn more.

Over time, the QA industry has developed many great processes and best practices that drive software and business success. But some practices are outdated, while others have negatively impacted product success. In this post, we share the Top 5 Don’ts of Software Testing.

2019 is just around the corner. For many people, that means it’s time for New Years’ resolutions both personal and professional. Whether your team is looking to upgrade your QA process in the new year or you’re looking to level up your QA career, it’s always a good idea to start the new year with […]

In this post we explore how to identify and approach breaking the QA bottleneck to ensure that your testing process doesn’t slow down your release cadence.

Black box testing is a form of software testing during which the functionality of an application is tested without looking at the code or internal structure. Any test which examines the interface of the application is considered black box testing.

Doing QA well is tough, even for innovative teams. Scaling good QA is even tougher. Learn how to scale your QA strategy without scaling your QA team.

At Rainforest QA we’ve spent years helping hundreds of customers to QA more effectively, and advising hundreds more on their QA strategies. And yet despite so many different customers, we’ve seen one just common failure mode: the boom and bust cycle. The boom and bust of QA is that after the initial excitement wears off, […]

The entire software development life cycle opens up many vulnerable areas for problems to occur, which is why it’s important to know where QA fits into the development workflows.

Learn how your organization can align its existing business goals with its QA strategy & how to create a quality mindset for long-term QA success.

Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that follows a short, repetitive, and continuous cycle of creating unique test cases for what companies want in their web or mobile application, then writing code to actually produce it with quality. Test-driven development differs from traditional QA testing because very specific test cases are written first […]

In this post we explore 3 ways that IKEA ensures product quality, and how software testing teams can apply those practices to their own QA process. Applying IKEA’s methodologies to your development workflow may be more beneficial than you’d expect.

When we think of Quality Assurance we typically think of Product and Engineering, but Digital Marketing teams own quality too. In this post, you will learn how incorporating a QA strategy into your digital marketing strategy leads to success.

Rainforest’s CIO, Derek Choy, and Sr. Professional Services Consultant, Jeff Pineda, recently discussed common pitfalls growing teams experience as they scale their agile QA processes. In this post we share the 4 most common pitfalls and how they can be avoided.

In this post we explore how to keep clusters of defects from bringing down your quality, and learn about a real-world fix for defect clustering with Bleacher Report’s Senior Automation Engineer Quentin Thomas. We also cover what is defect clustering and some key indicators you should look out for.

There’s no one-size-fits-all QA strategy that will work for every team. But there are a few key traits that successful QA teams have in common. Find out what your team can learn from how Facebook, Google, and other enterprise teams approach to agile QA.

In our recent webinar, The True Cost of Shipping Software Defects: Find Bugs Before Your Customers Do, Rainforest front-end engineer AJ Funk and product operations associate Cameron Sheya discussed how and why teams should start building a strategy to stop bugs before they hit production.

Anyone who has built out a suite of QA tests knows that your database of test cases can get bloated fast. By shifting testing focus from total coverage to strategic feature-driven testing, teams can drive more effective, impactful QA processes.

We dove into the archives of the Google Testing Blog to discover how other growing teams can learn from how Google approaches software testing.

A new year likely means new goals, whether you want to ship features faster, boost quality or scale your team. Learn 5 ways you can streamline your QA with continuous testing.

Artificial intelligence may have the limelight in HBO’s Westworld, but software development and QA practices are at the heart of the show, too. Here are four lessons that real QA teams can learn from the programming team at Delos, Inc. (Beware of spoilers below, if you haven’t finished Season One of Westworld!) A Good QA […]

eCommerce websites cannot afford to have bad UX, especially during peaks in site traffic. This post includes best practices of eCommerce QA testing & the top 5 test cases.

When you think about the quality of your QA strategy, is test coverage your primary metric for success? Does test execution time creep up as your product matures, as more and more test cases are added? Are bugs slipping through the cracks regardless of how many tests you run before release? It’s tempting to conflate […]

Our customers want to deploy fast and not be slowed by uncertain delays. One way to tighten their release cycle is by estimating well when a test run completes. However, estimates are hard because each customer has their own tests and environments, and yet being off by minutes or more could add that much to […]

Using version control for development teams is a well-established best practice. However, most QA teams don’t utilize it and can benefit from it too.

Distributed workforces aren’t a new concept, but as technology makes it easier and easier for employees to work from anywhere, it’s becoming a more common organizational model. Here at Rainforest, a significant percentage of our team has always been distributed. While that has its challenges, it’s also provided some critical benefits that we wouldn’t have […]

It’s no longer groundbreaking to suggest that having a diverse workforce is beneficial to organizations. Studies have shown that teams that include individuals with a variety of backgrounds are more adaptable to change and more effective at solving problems. But diversity can also have a significant impact on the bottom line of a business. McKinsey […]

From the persistence of bugs to the fallacy of throwing people at problems, here are 5 key software testing lessons from Fred Brooks' classic book, "The Mythical Man-Month."

In this post, we’ll dive into how teams can scale QA coverage for consumer apps to keep their testing processes fast and effective.

To improve and maintain customer satisfaction and retention, organizations must ensure that their products are not only be useful, but also straightforward and enjoyable to use. Usability testing is a method of testing that evaluates how easy it is for users to interact with the product.

Continuous deployment is pushing deployment cycles faster than ever, but QA teams often lack the efficiency and focus to keep pace with continuous deployment. Knowing what to test before releasing a product ensures that quality stays high and customers stay happy, yet 33% of QA engineers stated in a recent survey that identifying the right areas to […]

In our recent poll on the health of the QA industry, we found that over half of all QA teams surveyed are not very confident in their ability to ensure a high-quality product. Having a high degree of confidence in your QA process is important, as it helps you ensure that every deployment goes smoothly and […]

Today, we're sharing our approach to test writing and how you can use it to get better results from your QA tests.Crafting well-written test cases is critical to getting reliable, fast results from your manual QA tests.

Edtech has been stirring up investor interest to the tune of around $1.6 billion in 2015, and it’s showing no sign of slowing down. As Edtech booms, the pressure to create products that work seamlessly from the very first click increases. Developers will have to lean on high-impact QA practices to ensure their Edtech applications […]

Here are the seven major types of QA testing that all software teams should have on their checklist by the time their product reaches maturity.

You need QA, but how much should you spend and on what? In the world of software there are two big types of risk: death by 10,000 papercuts and death by catastrophic failure.

Cross browser testing is a pain. It’s also, sadly, an essential part of test coverage. Fret not! There are easy ways to reduce the pain. Solving the issue requires access to site stats, and a few handy pieces of Tech.

Most web applications are run in more than one place – usually at least two. The first one is the actual server that serves the application to the users. The second is the developer’s machine. It’s extremely important for developers to be able to test locally before deploying new code to all users. In this […]

Lets go over some of the types testing that can be done, when to use them and their benefits and downsides.

We believe dogfooding our own product has been crucial in helping us decide when to open up Rainforest to public beta. Confident that our product is fast and accurate enough to solve real-world QA needs, this has been a long journey and many things helped us get to this point. This blog post will explain […]