Know your Game !

Software Testing demands meticulous planning and careful execution, trust me its no less than a strategic game. Quality assurance in an organisation completely depend on the solutions/product the organisation is offering. Identification of target audience and understanding their needs is the vital step before we jump in and start designing test processes. Because, at the end of the day every product or application in the market is a solution to some existing problem.

All applications when grouped under the name "IT solutions" make it sound so similar. But they are way different from each other down the stair- OnPremise application, Web Application, Cloud based services, Mobile Apps etc .The main purpose of this write up is to emphasise the existence of distinctive applications and various QA flavours which are equally good in their own sense.

On a regular interaction with QA’s , specially senior QA’s/Team leads one thing I have found  very disappointing is their “King of Hill” attitude. Being confident about our test processes and feeling proud of our effort is appreciated however, we shouldn’t be unmindful of various others things followed in IT industry. People are too busy merrymaking the automation inadvertently neglecting the basic skills required to prep up the Quality activities specifically functional testing. 

The foundation for any QA strategy depends on 2 things Company strategy & Target Audience

Understanding target audience should be principal element in chalking out your test plan and bug resolution strategy. Beauty of IT solutions is its presence in almost all domains as shown below.

Whole lot of these products and applications can be grouped into 2 broad categories.

B2B solutions are also called Professional IT solutions, usually end users are closely coupled with domain knowledge 

Example: Supply Chain Management

The application created to manage a supply chain of a company is targeted to resolve the shortcomings of the supply chain processes. The end user for such applications are domain experts and it is assumed that user knows the working of the industry and is familiar with terminologies, like for example- end user is aware that sale order is to confirm the buyers request and sale invoice is generated once the order is fulfilled. The application only facilitates to carry out this process seamlessly

B2C solutions are offered to general public. These applications are developed to cater to people needs on daily basis.

Example: Retail Solutions

Since the boom of online market place traditional stores based businesses has taken a back step. Retail businesses are targeted to all consumers without any restriction on credentials. B2C solutions do not have flexibility to make any assumptions of their target customer, however they can do customer profiling and target the audience based product offering, like for example - 'Beard grooming kit', however you cannot restrict the female buyers who like to purchase it for gifting purposes.

QA's need to identify which side of the globe their application fall into and make their decisions accordingly. A very successful test plan of retail application may face an utter failure in ERP application basically because their end user's are different and the way they you consume the product is lot more different.

This below table carries out a generic comparison of above mentioned categories from QA activity perspective. It is no means a discrimination to prove one over the other, it is basically listed down to provide clarity on test activities to be designed by a QA based on the target audience.

So, make a wise decision by understanding the type of market you are catering to, It helps to shape your solution in better way.