Eggplant Blog

"The quality of your company’s software has a direct impact on the quality of your company’s financial results. You know it. Management knows it. And the importance of quality will only continue to grow with the need for 24x7 operations, high availability requirements, aggressive service-level agreements, and the need to roll out innovative new web-based services."

This was the first paragraph of a paper I wrote in 2005 about how to build your organization around a Testing Center of Excellence.

15 years on, we are still struggling with these concepts. The focus has turned towards project outcomes rather than business outcomes. Reasons include faster release cycles, more complex technology, and more technically astute end-users, with the result that QA lost sight of who was really using their applications.

You’ve tested the latest release of your application, and it works just fine. From a functional perspective, it does everything it’s supposed to.

But what if the user experience has changed in a way that wasn’t picked up in functional testing?

With the Shift-Up series thus far, we have explored the importance of testing and thinking as a customer. The basic premise is that we need to add another dimension to Quality Assurance other than Shift-Left and Shift-Right. This new dimension focuses on how your customer is actually using your application and if the intersection of your application, customer behavior, and your company’s business objectives all align. 

We recently released the much-anticipated Eggplant Functional 18.2, which includes some truly exciting innovations.