Gayathri Mohan - Full Stack Testing

• 2021-07-13: First Release
• 2021-08-24: Second Release

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This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

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In todays world, digitalization is inevitable to sustain and grow any business. Many businesses are leading the way in this aspect, while some are in the early phases of modernizing their existing digital platforms.

Digitalization is key to broadening a businesss reach from a local community to a global scale, translating to more adoption and more revenue. Almost all small and large-scale enterprises in various sectors, like health care, retail, travel, academics, social media, banking, entertainment, devise plans to advance their digital strategies as a critical measure to yield higher profits.

In this journey towards digitalization and modernization, innovation becomes a crucial driver. We can see the businesses that innovate constantly continue to thrive over many decades. Netflix is a classic example. It started as an online DVD rental portal in the 1990s. It ventured into movie streaming, making its own DVD rental business obsolete in the 2000s. It later started producing original content called Netflix Originals. As of 2021, Netflix is the largest online media subscription platform with over 200 million subscribers.

The technology space has been evolving in parallel to these innovative businesses to accommodate their increasingly advanced needs. Gone are the days where we were willing to wait in line to buy movie tickets, visit a store in a remote location to buy a specialty product, or carry around a hand-written shopping list searching for specifics. Technology eases everyday tasks extensively. We can sit at home and stream our favorite entertainment programs in one touch, try a new dress virtually, schedule our shopping list to be delivered regularly, and do even morebrew a coffee with voice command!

With such rapid evolution in technology, product strategy must be versatile, catering to different customer needs to survive the ongoing competition in their respective sectors. It has to expand its horizons beyond just building websites. Consider the ride-hailing companies, such as Uber and Lyft, which provide their services at our fingertips in various waysthe web, Android, and iOS mobile platforms. In some regions, they even provide tele-booking services through interactive voice response systems (IVR) and call centers. This kind of versatile product strategy has helped them expand across the globe and outgrow competitors.

With such versatile product strategy and innovation, the businesses become successful in acquiring a critical mass of customers. But now, the next challenge is to thrive furtherearn more revenue and more customers. We can see the giants in the industry, such as Amazon, leveraging their existing customer base to cross-sell services & products as a strategy to expand beyond. Amazon, which started as an online bookstore, now cross-sells various products ranging from fresh pantry items to electronics to retail products and more, meeting customer demand for consumer goods in nearly every market segment.

Todays software industry caters to all these business needsinnovate new product ideas, bring them to life, and scale them to reach new customer segments across the globe. To aid the process, they continuously learn new technologies. Unquestionably, the software development teams are standing on the edge, especially when the need for the hour is to deliver all of that with high quality!

Software quality is a non-negotiable criterion when it comes to sustaining a business in the long term. There are many examples of how a glitch in software quality can affect reputation and result in big loss for the businesses. For example, in October 2014, on Big Billion Day sale, the two Indian eCommerce giants SnapDeal and Flipkart went head to head on their seasonal sale. Flipkarts website crashed multiple times during the day due to overwhelming demand, losing their sales to Snapdeal.

We can see many such examples across the globe, where businesses albeit their novel product ideas, slip down a steep slope as customers quickly move on to more reliable competitors when quality is compromised. As a result, we can firmly say that quality is quintessential for sustaining a business in the long term.

Such high software quality can be reaped only by a combination of skillful development and meticulous testing. In particular, when I say meticulous testing, I refer to paying attention to every aspect of the application throughout its stack in various facets. This chapter will introduce the breadth of such full stack testing, which has to be performed for a typical web or mobile application.