Quality Assurance

Above: Caktus uses several mobile devices for accessibility testing. For a more realistic experience, it’s important to test on devices, and not just with simulators.

Above: The Internet Summit in Raleigh is one of the local conferences we recommend attending. (Photo by Ian Huckabee.)

At Caktus, we strongly believe in professional development and continued learning. We encourage our talented team to stay up to date with industry trends and technologies. During 2018, Cakti attended a number of conferences around the country. Below is a list (in alphabetical order) of the ones we found the most helpful, practical, and interesting. We look forward to attending these conferences again, and if you get the chance, we highly recommend that you check them out as well.

In 2018, we published 44 posts on our blog, including technical how-to’s, a series on UX research methods, web development best practices, and tips for project management. Among all those posts, 18 rose to the top of the popularity list in 2018.

On July 27 - 28, we ran our quarterly ShipIt Day here at Caktus. These 24-hour sprints, which we’ve organized since 2012, allow Cakti to explore new projects that expand or increase their skill sets. The event kicked off at 3:00 pm on Thursday and we reconvened at 3:00 pm on Friday to showcase our progress. The goal is to experiment, take risks, and try something new.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall - what’s the best test conference of them all? That’s the question that many of you may be asking yourselves when trying to decide which conference to attend. Well, we believe we have discovered what may be one of the top contenders for best software testing conferences: the Ministry of Testing’s TestBash.

Welcome to the 2018 edition of our annual PyCon Must-See Series, highlighting the talks our staff especially loved at PyCon. While there were many great talks, this is our team’s shortlist.

A defect, or bug, in a software product can be defined as a flaw in the system that leads to a measurable or observable deviation from its expected result. During development, it’s part of the quality assurance process to prioritize defects in order to minimize the impact to the end product and meet the agreed-upon quality level for the product. This prioritization can seem like a dark art. How do we decide what gets addressed and what doesn’t?

A crucial but often overlooked aspect of software development is quality assurance (QA). If you have an app in progress, you will likely hear this term throughout the development life cycle. It may seem that coding is the brunt of the development work, since without code your app doesn’t exist, but quality assurance efforts often consist of up to 50% of the total project effort (1) (and part of the QA effort is coding). Without quality assurance, your app may exist but it is unlikely it will function well, meet the objectives of your users, or be maintainable in the future. QA is important, but what exactly is it?

With 2017 now over, we highlight the top 17 posts published or updated on the Caktus blog this year. Have you read them all?

Our quarterly ShipIt Day has come and gone, with many new ideas and experiments from the team. As we do every quarter, Caktus staff stepped away from client work to try new technology, read up on the latest documentation, update internal processes, or otherwise find inspiring ways to improve themselves and Caktus as a whole. Keep reading to see what we worked on.