Explore how open source drives QA outsourcing! Leverage community-driven tools, gain transparency, and leverage collaborative testing approaches.
When your company builds a new technology, it goes through a complex and important process. It starts with the design phase to determine project objectives, plan resources, and decide on the full scope of the software. The project then enters the development phase, where the software is actually built. The build process can take some time and is generally considered the most important part of the entire development lifecycle.
Once the software is built, it ventures into the realm of testing. This is where quality assurance comes into play, a process that cannot be overlooked or underestimated. During the QA part of the cycle, bugs are found and fixed, the UX is curated, and everything can end up changing drastically from the original specs.
For some companies, the quality control process is the most difficult. Why? In many cases, it is simply a question of qualified personnel. However, some companies do not give the necessary importance to the quality control phase. When this happens, the software does not go through as rigorous a verification process as it should. To that end, bugs remain, user experience isn't as good as it should be, and security isn't up to expected standards.
The lesson here is that your company – and the software it produces – needs to employ quality assurance. If your IT departments don't include staff for this purpose, you can always turn to quality control outsourcing.
If you don't know why QA services can help improve your development lifecycle, read these 5 reasons to hire a QA outsourcing company.
Once you're convinced that software testing outsourcing is the right option for your company, it's time to take a look at your software. In particular, the various licenses for the software you create and use.
If you haven't bothered to consider the licenses that govern your software (and the various software your internal applications interact with), you should. Why? Because there is an option available that can make quality assurance considerably easier.
The license in question is open source (in particular, the GNU General Public License – GPL ). And how can an open source license facilitate quality control? Let's take a look.
What is the GPL?
Before we delve into the various reasons why open source can help your development lifecycle, let's first define open source. That's easy:
Open source is a license that ensures that software is released in such a way that the code is made available to the general public. Most importantly, this license allows you to change and redistribute this source code.
At this point, you might be thinking, “But we can’t open source the software we create for our company!” But you can. Say, for example, you create a new Content Management System for your specific company. This CMS tool includes several plugins that expand the feature set so it can interact with other software across your supply chain. You could open source the CMS but leave the plugins proprietary.
What is the advantage of doing this? First, you open that software up to a very large development community that can improve it in ways that its developers might not have considered. Releasing this software with an open source license also means that other (possibly smaller) companies could benefit from this work. And since your company probably already uses open source software, you can consider this an upfront payment.
Now that we've got licensing out of the way, we can talk about the ways in which open source makes the quality control process easier.
Open standards and APIs
The International Standards Organization (ISO) defines standards as:
“…a document that provides requirements, specifications, guidelines or characteristics that can be used consistently to ensure that materials, products, processes and services are fit for purpose.”
Following open standards makes it considerably easier for the software you create to interact with other software. To better understand this, consider that your company created that CMS tool and needs it to work with other software. If the developers of that other software have not used open standards or open APIs, their developers will have considerable difficulty fixing that software.
To make matters worse, when closed standards and proprietary software are used, QA testing can only go so far, go so far. Your QA outsourcing team may come back to you and say, “Feature A doesn’t work,” but they can’t help you understand why. With open standards and APIs, the QA team will be able to better understand why this happens. So instead of being told that “Resource A” doesn’t work, you can be told that Resource A is using a system call that cannot be interpreted by a specific API and even illustrate how to fix the problem.
Open standards and APIs make it much easier for quality assurance to not only do its job, but also provide much more detailed information.
Open source is everywhere
Your company already uses open source software. Maybe it's Apache or NGINX web servers. You may be using one of the many open source databases or a framework released under the GPL.
Since your company already employs open source technology, your QA team has the ability to know what you are working with. Chances are quite good that they have already worked extensively with several of these titles and software libraries, so there is less accelerated uptime.
Another reason your QA team will benefit from widespread use of open source is that much of this software has already been documented at multiple levels, in multiple languages, and from virtually every perspective. All of this readily available documentation makes it easier for your team to better understand how your software fits into the tools you already use.
And when a problem arises, chances are a solution has already been documented. This creates an incredibly short feedback loop for the quality control process. And if there's a question your developers can't answer for the QA team, chances are it was answered by someone else.
Various test environments
When using proprietary software, you limit the scope of available testing environments. With open source, this limitation is completely revoked. Think of it this way: let's say you create software that requires a web server. Your current web server is IIS, which is a proprietary offering from Microsoft. Because of this, your QA team will be limited to the test environment they can use.
But what if the software you created is also used in other places that can work with Apache, NGINX or LightHTTP? When you limit this software to proprietary solutions, the QA team may not be able to test the code on other web servers. You have effectively limited the scope of testing.
This is not the case with open source. When working with open source software, you enjoy very diverse testing environments that can go a long way toward ensuring your software can be deployed anywhere.
Conclusion
The benefits of open source software are many and widespread. When applied to QA software testing, these limitations can make the difference between efficient and effective testing or slower and less reliable testing. Try open source software and expand the scope of your development cycle.
