Modern Quality Assurance Technique!

As soon as the developer starts building the software, the start testing them as well. Quality assurance, of course, is a crucial part of a software development which determines the success or failure of the product in the market. But have you ever wondered how we got from the early days of programming to the modern world of testing with Selenium and cloud-based testing techniques? This blog walks you through the modern and traditional aspects of software quality assurance.

Olden days Techniques

One of the crucial parts of software quality assurance on those days to till now is the debugging. Also, the Quality Assurance Professionals are trained to conduct configuration testing, platform compatibility to make sure that a program works in all of the environments for which it’s designed. Another is assuring user-friendliness. It’s also worth understanding that on earlier days, programmers often worked in small teams. They adhered to the “cathedral”-style approach to software development advocated by Fred Brooks, who argued in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month that programming is easiest when projects are small, finite, and when a lot of testing can be done before releasing products to the public.

One of those is debugging. Another involves configuration testing or making sure a program works in all of the environments for which it’s designed. Another is assuring user-friendliness. And the list goes on. It’s also worth noting that, early on, programmers tended to work in small teams. They adhered to the “cathedral”-style approach to software development advocated by Fred Brooks, who argued in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month that programming is easiest when projects are small, finite, and when a lot of testing can be done before releasing products to the public. In the first decades of computing, when cross-platform programming languages like C did not yet exist and programs frequently incorporated assembly code that worked on only one specific type of computer chip, software was rarely designed to run in many different environments. That made configuration testing less important, since there were fewer configurations to test for. Your users’ computers had to be pretty identical to your own or your software wouldn’t run at all. Under these conditions, the type of software testing that platforms like Sauce Labs deliver today was done as part of the broader debugging process. With small teams of programmers, relatively few environment variables for a given software program, and little pressure to release code on a frequent basis, an ad hoc approach to software testing worked well enough.

Especially when the cross-platform programming languages like C did not yet exist and programs regularly incorporated various assembly code that worked on only one distinctive type of hardware chip, system or application was rarely designed to run in many varied platforms or environments. That made configuration testing less important since there were fewer configurations to test for. Your users’ computers had to be pretty identical to your own or your software wouldn’t run at all. Under these conditions, the type of software testing that platforms like Sauce Labs deliver today was done as part of the broader debugging process. With small teams of programmers, relatively few environment variables for a given software program, and little pressure to release code on a frequent basis, an ad hoc approach to software testing worked well enough.

Modern Day Quality Assurance

Several things changed over the years in many areas of software quality assurance. Particularly, IBM’s introduction in 1981 of the PC (and the many clones it spawned) revolutionized hardware. Software Programmers were equipped to write codes for a single hardware platform. By the 1990s, PCs were not identical, of course. The specifics of each machine’s hardware and software could vary widely. But programmers faced increasing pressure to release software that worked well on any type of computer advertised as PC-compatible.

Another change was increasing demand for more frequent software releases. This was the result of many factors, like the commercialization of software, and businesses’ desire to keep customers happy by providing new and updated products on a consistent basis. Another was the growing importance of the Internet, which provided a much faster way to distribute new versions of programs. And then there was the advent of open source, heralded by projects like Linux. 

And while the Linux crowd showed that it was possible to develop complex software by releasing code to the public and asking users to help find defects, the companies that started trying to sell Linux in the early 1990s quickly learned that better configuration testing and another quality assurance was needed in order to make open source commercially viable. Red Hat didn’t become a billion-dollar company by inventing Linux – it became successful by assuring that its versions of Linux actually worked under particular different hardware and software configurations, then selling support services for Linux on those platforms.