Independent Quality Assurance

The Pulse Testing department works as an independent software testing agency working on in house projects as well as testing software for other software development companies, corporations and individuals.

Pulse is an independent quality assurance agency. We have an independent software testing & quality assurance team that works as an independent software testing agency for in-house and other software development companies, corporations and individuals.

Years of experience and a world class testing process makes us one of the top software quality assurance agency for the web applications domain. We not only test new products, we make change management a lot simpler and cheaper.

Changes are inevitable to any software system, often changes take systems down multiplying the overall change deployment cost several times over. This is where we come in, we replicate the client’s environment piece by piece in our lab and run through the changes to be applied using all permutations and combinations to ensure the software stays stable after deployment.

Building a test strategy is the first step towards professional testing. The test strategy is a formal description of how a software product will be tested. Without a strategy, testing has very little meaning.

Our test team analyzes business requirements to formulate a test strategy leading to test cases and finally a test plan is developed in coordination with the project development team. The test plan includes definition of test cases, conditions, test environment, a list of related tasks, pass/fail criteria and risk assessment.

Pulse uses excellent hardware/software infrastructure, automated testing tools, a strong project management system and a time tested proven testing process to certify solutions built by the Pulse development team. External software development houses and independent clients contract us to evaluate and certify their products.

Some of our most popular testing projects are:

Test Strategy Formulation

If you start thinking about testing during the coding process, you’re too late. You should begin to plan your testing during the analysis phase. Step one is to formulate a Testing Strategy.

The test strategy is a formal description of how a software product will be tested. A test strategy is developed for all levels of testing, as required. Our test team analyzes the requirements, formulates the test strategy and reviews the plan with the project team. The test plan may include test cases, conditions, test environment, a list of related tasks, pass/fail criteria and risk assessment.

The purpose of the Testing Strategy is to define the overall context for the entire testing process. The process is different depending on the specific characteristics of your solution.

We at Pulse Solutions provide complete coverage for your tools and strategies and where required we can pass on this knowledge within the project or within the whole company. Pulse Solutions’ test strategy provides companies the ability to implement a company wide strategy quickly and easily.

We recognize that there are no fixed test strategies. Each test strategy and client requires a unique solution.

Basic parts of a test strategy document:

Project Overview: Gives the overall project overview.
Business Risks: These are high-level risks of the project that will affect the overall testing strategy. The risks are classified as high, medium, and low, depending on the nature and impact of the problem.
Testing Milestones: This section gives the preliminary overview of the testing timelines.
Testing Approach: This describes the testing process at a high level, including how you will conduct unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and acceptance testing. For system testing, define the major testing events, such as stress testing, security testing, disaster recovery testing, usability testing, and response time testing.
Testing Environment: Analysis and documentation of the solution technology and infrastructure required for testing e.g. Hardware and Software needs.

Depending on your project, there may be other high-level sections to include, such as testing objectives, testing assumptions, testing organization, and testing tools, along with effort and cost estimates.

Usability Analysis

“How do I do this?” – Are such questions being asked by the users of your software/website? Pulse Solutions can help you overcome several difficulties by performing Usability Testing.

Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system.

Usability testing focuses on measuring a human-made product’s capacity to meet its intended purpose. Usability testing measures the usability, or ease of use, of a specific object or set of objects, whereas general human-computer interaction studies attempt to formulate universal principles.

During usability testing, the aim is to observe people using the product to discover errors and areas of improvement. Usability testing generally involves measuring how well test subjects respond in four areas: efficiency, accuracy, recall, and emotional response. The results of the first test can be treated as a baseline or control measurement; all subsequent tests can then be compared to the baseline to indicate improvement.

Efficiency: How long does it take people to complete basic tasks?
Accuracy: How many mistakes did people make?
Recall: How much does the person remember afterwards or after periods of non-use?
Emotional response: How does the person feel about the tasks completed? Is the person confident, stressed? Would the user recommend this system to a friend?

Contact us if you need your system tested for usability problems.

Regression Testing

Regression testing is any type of software testing which seeks to uncover regression bugs.

Regression bugs occur whenever software functionality that previously worked as desired, stops working or no longer works in the same way that was previously planned. Typically regression bugs occur as an unintended consequence of program changes.

Common methods of regression testing include re-running previously run tests and checking whether previously fixed faults have re-emerged.

Today’s advanced software development tools allow software vendors to produce maintenance and upgrade releases faster than ever before. However, installing a new release of software into one layer of the system exposes the entire system to new problems.

Retesting or regression is repetitive work but very important to ensure that nothing is broken when the system was upgraded, modified. Unless the application is fully recertified the system simply cannot be safely taken live.

In many cases, Senior Managers are reluctant to upgrade system components such as databases once it is considered to be stable. To provide ‘piece of mind’ that the new upgrade has not caused complications elsewhere in the system regression testing is required.

Our Regression Testing service allows our clients to add value to their systems without the threat of damaging the live application. By utilizing the test scripts created when the system was first installed, we can quickly evaluate the customers’ needs. If test scripts are not available we can produce a new set suitable for the customers system.

By running these established tests through the system they can be captured and recorded for use against the new configuration. As a subset of Regression Testing, we can provide upgrade tests designed to compare application output and performance before and after an upgrade, and alert application developers to any bugs that may have been introduced.
Contact us if you’d like us to evaluate your product for regression testing.

White Box Testing

White box testing deals with the internal logic and structure of the code. White box testing is also called as glass, structural, open box or clear box testing. The tests written based on the white box testing strategy incorporate coverage of the code written, branches, paths, statements and internal logic of the code etc.

In order to implement white box testing, the tester has to deal with the code and hence he is needed to possess knowledge of coding and logic i.e. internal working of the code. White box testing also needs the tester to look into the code and find out which unit / statement / chunk of the code is malfunctioning.

Advantages of White box testing are:

The Pulse testing team considers white box testing as the most important phase after usability.
Contact us if you have a need to professionally evaluate code that was written by your development team to ensure the system not only looks good from the outside it’s also stable and clean from the inside.

Compatibility Certification

Compatibility is the hardest aspect of any software suite, as operating systems, hardware devices and other supporting software continuously evolve. It is crucial that your softwares keeps up to offer a consistent user experience.

This is a very important aspect of any web site design that is almost always overlooked until a disgruntled user calls.

Websites behave differently in different browsers as there is no universal agreement of all web standards. Similarly software behaves differently on each operating system. In spite of this seemingly impossible problem all commercial websites and software systems must perform uniformly on all browsers and platforms, this is where compatibility testing comes into play.

We have an excellent team of engineers who are well versed with the most compatibility problems, they can not only spot the problems but also guide the development team on how to fix them easily and effectively.

Our lab is fully equipped with all popular hardware and software combinations including all Microsoft operating systems, 2 versions of Apple operating systems and 3 versions of Linux operating systems.

This testing process involves each module being meticulously tested on all combinations of software/hardware and specific issues raised with prospective solutions that would assist developers to fix problems quickly.

Contact us here if you’d like us to evaluate your product for compatibility testing.

User Acceptance Tests 

Acceptance Testing is the formal testing conducted to determine whether a software system satisfies its acceptance criteria and to enable a buyer to determine whether to accept the system or not.

Pulse Solutions has worked on thousands of projects and thus has vast experience in User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Our Acceptance Testing Service is designed to determine whether software/website is fit for use for the purpose it was commissioned for.

User Acceptance Testing is different from System Testing. System Testing is invariably performed by the development team which includes developer and tester. User acceptance testing on the other hand should ideally be carried out by the end user but often this is not possible, in such scenarios our team becomes an extension of your company and works on site with your staff to help deploy the software as a prototype and replicate the users day to day operations on the new software, in the process uncovering limitations and problems.

UAT is often an expensive and time consuming process that takes a toll on the users productivity. Pulse UAT specialists make this process easy, cheap and seamless.

This service requires engineers to travel onsite.

Contact us if you’d like us to evaluate your project for UAT.

Stress Tests

Stress testing is a form of testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system or entity. It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results.

Online success is elusive but often when a website does become successful it starts with a sudden surge of users. Server being stretched is the reason why several websites go down when there is growth in traffic. This knowledge of the breaking point of your website infrastructure is crucial, you may not plan for a million users hitting your website on day 1 but it is important that you have the information on how much traffic can you handle before you plan to buy a server or install a cluster.

This form of testing is intended to find errors due to low resources or competition for resources.

Low memory or disk space may also reveal defects in the software that are not apparent under normal conditions. Other defects might result from competition for shared resources such as database locks or network bandwidth. Often only some of several system modules fail under pressure pointing towards bad coding or memory leaks which can be plugged for better overall performance.

Simply put, stress testing identifies the peak load a system can handle.

Pulse engineers use in-house programs as well as sophisticated off the shelf software to emulate thousands of users on your website to generate a report that not only contains the maximum supported users but also the speed of degradation and the specific modules that are most critically affected when your website is under duress.

Contact us here if you’d like us to evaluate your product for stress testing.