Quality Assurance (QA) in Digital Ag Solutions
What steps do our engineers take to build quality digital solutions for farmers, retailers and other agriculture ecosystem stakeholders?
Anisha Singh is a Senior Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer in Yara Digital Ag Solutions.
What is a Quality Assurance (QA) process?
In Yara Digital Ag Solutions (DAS), our Software Testing Engineers perform Quality Assurance (QA) activities to ensure our products’ quality.
Why is QA important to DAS?
Our Product teams build apps such as Atfarm, YaraConnect and AfricaConnect, which generate agronomic recommendations, provide access to knowledge, connect retailers and farmers, trace the movement of inputs, and more.
As such, a smooth user experience, and building trust with our users and partners is important. This means that minimising and addressing any potential defects is highly prioritised.
DAS’ Testing Engineers ensure the quality of our apps and software by investigating and checking if our products meet certain requirements and specifications.
What benefits does the QA process bring?
Improved software quality
QA checks help us identify issues with our software product’s security, speed, and responsiveness. Once any issues are found, our Development team can start eliminating them.
A well-established QA process helps us not only maintain the quality of our software products but also may prevent bugs and rework.
Higher user satisfaction
The fewer bugs our software has, the more satisfied our users are. Our Testing Engineers not only check if the software meets functional requirements but also ensure that our farmers’, retailers’ and advisors’ user experience is as smooth as possible.
Reduced costs
The earlier we find a bug in a software product, the cheaper it is to fix it. If implemented appropriately, a QA process helps us detect bugs at early stages, or even prevent them altogether.
How does the DAS Quality Assurance team test the product?
Here’s an example of how Digital Ag Solutions’ QA teams handle testing and reporting:
1. Requirements analysis
Before performance testing begins, our QA team needs to determine what they are going to test. We create a ‘Requirements Document’ that includes the platforms, modules, and instructions that we will test.
2. Creating a test plan
The test plan shows in detail how our team will perform tests. This outlines the manual and automated tests to be performed.
3. Designing test cases
The test cases are a predetermined series of steps our QA testers will follow during the QA process. These can range from simple inspections of mobile application interactions to more advanced tests focused on integration use cases between our different solutions.
4. Running test cases
Once testing starts, our team finds and logs any performance issues or bugs that come up. As we go through each test case, we will highlight anything that’s broken so our engineers can focus on fixing the issues.
5. Retesting fixed bugs and running regression testing
Once our team is done fixing the issues, we conduct regression testing to ensure the recent changes have not adversely affected existing features in our software or programmes.
6. Reporting
Once the QA team is done with testing, we’ll create a report showing the bug fixes, outstanding issues to be resolved, and the results of regression tests.
Types of Testing in DAS
Tools DAS uses for QA Testing
For readers that want to know more about QA, we’ve listed some of the tools that we use in DAS, which you may explore:
- Test Case Studio is a platform that we use to record the user actions performed on a web application in English Sentences. It will also generate the XPath and Automation Code for every user action. Users can save or copy these recorded steps as a ‘test case’. For more information, watch this video.
- INSTANA is an application monitoring tool. We use it to check the health of our services. For more details, watch this video.
- KIBANA is an open-source browser-based visualisation tool that we use to analyse large volume of logs in the form of line graph, bar graph, pie charts, heat maps, region maps, coordinate maps, gauge, goals etc.
The visualisations make it easy to predict or spot changes in trends of errors or other significant events of the input source. For more details, watch this video. - Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so we can create better APIs more quickly.
- GraphQL is a new API standard that provides a more efficient, powerful and flexible alternative to REST principles. It was developed and open-sourced by Facebook and is now maintained by a large community of companies and individuals from all over the world. At its core, GraphQL enables declarative data fetching where a client can specify exactly what data it needs from an API. Instead of multiple endpoints that return fixed data structures, a GraphQL server only exposes a single endpoint and responds with precisely the data a client asked for.
- BrowserStack provides an instant access to a cloud platform that allows teams to comprehensively test their websites and mobile applications for functionality, performance, and visual appeal, so they can release bug-free software faster and at scale.
I hope that this article has provided you with a useful overview of the QA process we undertake to build trusted and easy-to-use solutions for agriculture stakeholders. Look out for more articles on digital product development by following our publication.
Digital Ag Solutions is on the lookout for engineers that are keen on building products that bring value to and are trusted by farmers, retailers, advisors, food and agriculture businesses. Check out our open QA positions here.
