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Blog - Applause’s Bug Fix Verification: Speed Up Your Development Velocity

Applause’s Bug Fix Verification: Speed Up Your Development Velocity

After your Engineering team addresses a problematic bug, how do you ensure that the bug is completely and soundly fixed, and won’t cause your customers any issues in the future?

Closing this loop is a key portion of QA testing, and Applause believes it’s important to rely on the source that found the bug originally to validate that the bug is 100% fixed. If the teams of QA testers that identified the bug can no longer reproduce it and indeed verify that the bug is now fixed, the loop has been truly closed.

This is why Applause supports an end-to-end bug fix verification (BFV) process. After an organization has fixed a bug that was identified by Applause’s curated team of vetted QA testers, the bug can be sent back to the Applause community and re-tested.

Benefits of Running BFV with Applause

Here are a few benefits of running a BFV process with Applause:

  • Peace of mind that bugs are fixed before they are pushed to the field
  • Third-party verification takes the process out of the hands of engineers or test labs, where verification might be difficult
  • Automated process with two-way integration enables a continuous integration workflow
  • Empowers a real-time Applause Quality Score™ rating

Let’s dig into these in a little more detail. First off, if the purpose of QA is to prevent show-stopper bugs from reaching your customers, then your last line of defense shouldn’t be fixing a bug — it should be confirming that the bug can’t be reproduced. A trained QA team that knows how to reproduce bugs is the best way to confirm that the bug won’t impact your customers.

That leads into the next point — engineers are not always equipped to reproduce bugs, and therefore can’t say with certainty that the bug is actually fixed. The engineer could run an automation regression test, sure — but remember, QA professionals bring a unique skill set, and it’s not realistic to expect an engineer to fill those shoes. QA better understands how to reproduce the bug, and can test for it on multiple devices and browsers.

Given the need for development velocity, Applause has automated and sped up the Bug Fix Verification process. As part of Applause’s two-way integration with organizations’ Jira bug tracking system — which you can read much more about here — Applause can automatically receive a notification of fixed bugs and reassign them back to testers that can verify the bug fix on the same environments (device, country, language, etc.) as the bug that was originally reported. These efficiencies are especially useful for CI teams, since BFV makes it easier to test more often and faster.

Applause can automatically receive a notification of fixed bugs and reassign them back to testers that can verify the bug fix on the same environments (device, country, language, etc.) as the bug that was originally reported

In addition, Applause now provides an Applause Quality Score rating, or AQS™ rating, as a way to quantify the quality of individual software builds. Using advanced algorithms, the AQS rating shows, on a scale of 0-100, the strength of a build. Applause’s BFV process ensures that number reflects the quality of the builds after the bug(s) have been addressed. Moreover, the updated bidirectional Jira integration not only streamlines the BFV process and the way the score is calculated, but also yields a much more accurate calculation, based on how an organization prioritizes issues in Jira.

Why Applause Should Help

Organizations often leverage their internal QA team to verify that the Engineering team has successfully addressed the bugs that Applause identified. This is a good best practice — if an organization’s internal QA team can still reproduce the bug, then it’s clear that the bug is still live and needs to go back again to Engineering.

The nature of Applause’s global community of trained QA testers often make this group the best candidate to verify that the bug no longer exists.

Applause’s testers are spread across the world, from North America to Africa to Asia and everywhere in-between. They are conducting in-market, localized and “in-the-wild” testing, which is impossible for an internal QA team to replicate, especially at scale and in the midst of a global pandemic, when it is outright impossible to match Applause’s global reach.

In addition, Applause can access hundreds of devices to test on and confirm the fix works across mobile, web and IoT devices. As an example of how this looks in practice, read up on how Applause recently provided testing across 98 iOS and 105 Android devices for Mobimeo.

Process with Applause Jira Integration

Our earlier blog post highlights how Applause offers integration capabilities with bug tracking systems, such as Jira, to speed up development velocity and reduce the need for manually moving bugs from the Applause Platform to an organization’s bug tracking system.

For organizations that leverage Jira, Applause offers a two-way integration that enables an automated and smooth Bug Fix Verification process. Here’s how the process works:

  1. After the organization fixes a bug, the Applause team gets an automated message to retest the bug. Applause receives the issues based on how the organization prioritizes the bugs, ensuring that Applause reviews the most critical bugs first
  2. The tester reads through the original bug that was logged, follows the same steps to attempt to reproduce the bug, and verifies if the bug was actually fixed or not
  3. If the bug is fixed, the Applause team sends the bug back to the organization’s Jira as a verified fix
  4. If the bug is not fixed, the Applause team bumps the bug back a stage so that the organization’s Engineering team can readdress it

Get Started with Applause’s Bug Fix Verification

Applause is ready to get started with verifying your bug fixes today.

If you’re a current customer and want to learn more about leveraging Applause for bug fix verification, reach out to your delivery manager for more information.

And if you’re just learning about Applause and want to know more about our fully managed service and capabilities to identify bugs, head here to reach out and we’ll be in touch soon.

Whitepapers

Introducing the Applause Quality Score™

Applause Quality Score ratings enable users to assess the effectiveness and thoroughness of their structured and exploratory tests build-over-build to make informed release decisions.

Read 'Introducing the Applause Quality Score™' Now

Apps targeting young people

Naturally, banks and online brokers are also increasingly offering mobile solutions for stock trading. However, this new group of fintech startups has a different structure than traditional providers. As international apps with social media appeal, they are aimed at a particularly young target group of 25- to 35-year-olds who want not only access to stock trading but also a new kind of user experience. It has become clear that accessibility and user-friendliness are key selling points for these new investment apps. For example, according to Bitkom’s Digital Finance Report 2020, 40% of respondents expressed the expectation that “smartphone apps’ ease of use for stock and securities transactions will enable more people to benefit from companies’ performances.”

In a nutshell, the easy access via smartphones makes these “neobrokers” so appealing. Clear design, community integration, and ease of entry has turned UI/UX into an actual product.

Special opportunities – special risks?

Many apps have little to no limit on how small a trade can be, making it possible to buy fractional shares. As mentioned, they charge very low fees — or none at all — and are available outside of regular trading hours. The apps clearly aim to lower the entry threshold for stock trading, and sometimes lure new users with free shares. On the flip side, the apps offer no or minimal investing advice, unlike traditional brokers. Consequently, purchasers must do their own research outside of the app, using articles, forums and social media. This aspect has raised suspicions in the German market. In the survey undertaken for the Bitkom Digital Finance Report referenced above, 69% of respondents stated that “an advisor’s input is absolutely key to making good investment decisions.” As a result, the separation of professional advisory services and the gamification of trading stocks carries certain risks, especially for inexperienced users.

Too much power?

The potential dynamics unleashed by direct market access were demonstrated in an interesting case study in January. Small investors coordinated a purchase of GameStop stock via Reddit to prevent a decline in the company’s value, on which hedge funds had speculated. In fact, the Reddit community’s actions were so successful that U.S. authorities are now investigating the possibility of market manipulation. Outrage erupted, however, when Robinhood simply suspended trading in GameStop shares at the height of the buying frenzy.

Ultimately, the neobroker did have a good reason for halting trading. The security it had deposited with clearinghouse DTCC was insufficient to match increased trading volume. However, this episode illustrates that some luster has fallen from the new market power of small investors: Even trading apps do not eliminate the intermediary function; they only replace it, sometimes with even more opaque conditions than before.

The outlook is promising

And yet, neobrokers are attracting young investors by reinventing the process of investing and stock trading. With pleasing designs and customer experiences geared toward millennials, these apps will be able to gain many users in the next few years. At that point, they will have to show that they can keep up with the momentum that they created. Users expect apps, acting as financial service providers and managers of highly sensitive data, to be error-free at all times and in all places – and rightly so. User trust and compliance with financial rules will play a crucial role in determining whether neobrokers will remain competitive as market penetration continues.

However, the new investment apps’ penetration of the DACH market is still at an early stage. Established providers, especially banking apps, may leverage the trend by incorporating a more attractive UX and simplified investment features into their existing apps. For example, a whitepaper from the Sparkassen Innovation Hub on the topic of changing values recommends “opening up products to small investment amounts” as well as “using a clear, appealing interface (UI), playful elements for data entry and maintenance, [and] the use of status and progress indicators to guide users through processes” to attract a new group of potential investors.

One thing is certain: The phenomenal growth of investment and trading apps, especially in Germany, could be a precursor to interesting developments in the coming years.

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Dan Cagen
Dan Cagen
Former Product Marketing Manager
Published On: August 6, 2020
Reading Time: 6 min
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