Software Customization & QA – The Best Combo for a Quality Project
What connects octopuses and software development? No, it is not the need for extreme brains to operate successfully (octopuses have nine). It is the ability to learn, adapt, and change to fit the ecosystem around. And this talent has become paramount for companies that want to lead the IT market.
The software world is oversaturated to a point where users tend to pick an option that stands out, be it via UI, unique features, or a pleasant “vibe”. And a great way to grab a customer’s attention is customization. With it, you can gain more clients and tailor the product to your mission. A customized project means authentic UX and precise business goals.
And to leverage the power of customization, exhaustive software quality assurance testing is to be a part of the journey.
Ready-To-Use Software Solutions vs Customization
Using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software to build a platform or settling on a particular customization level is profitable only in the short term. There is an acceptable amount of functions and UI traits that will put you on the market. But as customer needs change and the number of competitors increases, a product that sticks to its initial form eventually becomes obsolete.
For an evolving and lasting project, customization, whatever shape it takes, is pivotal.
Realizing Specific Business Needs
Customization can help you effectively realize your business goals. And by concentrating custom development on areas of risk or interest, you can prevent potential issues and strengthen your workflows and processes.
As an illustration, Walmart created a custom inventory management system to let their distributors view data on inventory levels and selling rates. Via this implementation, vendors decide how many items to send and when, while Walmart monitors the transit of goods. This diminished shipment delays and reduced supplier management expenses.
Obtaining Competitive Advantage
Applying customized features and functionalities can also make your product stand out. After all, when you offer something others do not, you automatically become an industry vanguard. But it also means that you need to adjust your platform to properly support your innovation.
For example, Netflix built a custom recommendation system that relies on user data to suggest content. What is more, the company took a step further and modified their engine to alter movie titles based on the preferred genre of consumers. Such an approach enhanced customer engagement and retention.
Establishing & Strengthening the Brand
One of the greater advantages of customization is unique branding. Personalized UI and functions make your project more recognizable and distinctive. Further, you can tailor your product’s look and feel to provide consistent user experience across all digital properties. Thus, you can create an exclusive space for dedicated users, advancing customer loyalty.
That is precisely why Shopify quickly moved to the forefront of e-commerce platform builders. As compared to Amazon, a giant in the field, the company offers full customization of client networks. And today, individualized brands are perceived as soulful and more friendly, hence easier to connect to.
Enhancing Integrations
Modifying your product to better integrate with other software systems and applications allows for seamless cooperation with other infrastructures. So you can better your services, effectively collaborate with beneficial partners, and please your customers with tailored experiences. Also, customization lets you refine data sharing and workflow automation, which would also positively affect your teams’ productivity.
For example, Monday integrated Freshdesk to automate customer messages’ flow by synchronizing them through REST/GraphQL API. Monday could not receive messages to automatically create tickets. So it used a custom plugin to join Freshdesk, a tool designed to manage requests from multiple communication channels. The integration improved efficiency and transparency in the work process by combining the features of both tools.
Securing Scalability
Custom software can be designed to be modular and flexible, allowing it to adapt and evolve with changing business needs. Customization also ensures easier integration with existing legacy systems, which can help you avoid costly and time-consuming migrations. And as COTS software cannot account for all possible company and market shifts, customization is often the only way forward.
That is exactly how Ayoka secured the future of a finance system. A company’s legacy network relied on time-consuming, manual processes, and limited functions. So, it needed to unite older infrastructure with a new accounts receivable system. By creating an integration application and customizing both ends, the company could automate its workflows and substantially advance the accounts receivable system’s speed.
Advancing Localization
Customizing your platform for different user groups allows you to expand the client base and make the product more accessible and relevant to wider audiences. Further, custom software can help create solutions that are tailored to specific cultures. In turn, this improves customer experience and increases market share.
For instance, Canva reached 30 million users by establishing a custom module to cooperate with Smartling (a translation company). AI-generated content was automatically parsed into strings and sent to a translator. Assigned translators completed the work by locating and editing the translated strings without accessing the codebase. This led to advanced translation memory, simplified localization, better UX, and Canva’s expansion.
Improving Support & Maintenance
As mentioned, with customization, you can tailor the product to meet the specific needs of your company and users. This streamlines workflows, reduces errors, and makes the software easier to use. Consequently, custom solutions minimize potential support issues and enhance scalability, making it easier to maintain as your project grows.
Custom software means your teams know exactly what to expect and how to better leverage present features. It also allows you to narrow down the focus to accommodate truly worthy functions instead of trying to make use of everything a COTS system may offer. Hence, you can minimize downtime due to unforeseen bugs and decrease the overall cost of ownership.
Examples of Why You Should Test Your Software Customizations
Custom software designs provide powerful benefits, but they are also quite complicated. That is why customized software engineering calls for committed dev teams and skilled quality assurance experts. Testing validates the efforts undertaken and offers refining touches that can level up your software on many fronts.
Implementing E-Shop Integrations: Shopify Case
E-commerce platforms like Shopify offer a wide range of features and seamless integration with third-party plugins and extensions. And when you want to benefit from that for your project, thorough testing is a must. As even the slightest modification can create a new platform variation and compatibility issues, software quality assurance should always go hand in hand with customization.
Further, integrating custom or third-party plugins may be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. It may be challenging to cover certain tasks due to a lack of time or expertise. So additional QA resources help minimize the chance of any modifications compromising the platform’s performance or UX.
Rethinking Existing Platforms: Magento Case
Magento was developed as an e-commerce platform and not meant for service marketplaces. But one of our clients saw potential in Magento’s flexible architecture and customized it to fit their service marketplace needs, expanding their customer base. However, the customization process needs careful planning and testing to ensure a smooth user experience.
Modifying the front-end, creating new payment and checkout processes, and implementing service-specific booking and scheduling systems were essential for this idea. So for the project, the crucial points of focus were functional, UI, regression, and smoke testing. These helped ensure that each module worked as intended, no alteration broke the existing features, and that the strongly customized platform was user-friendly.
Optimizing Local Taxi/Delivery/Courier App
Let’s say you decide to use an app-building platform to create delivery software. Applying the flexibility of customization to COTS solutions is most exciting yet complex. Even minor alterations to the pre-existing features, such as adding a payment option, can lead to unexpected bugs.
For instance, the app-building platform’s original codebase may not be compatible with the new addition, leading to errors, crashes, and slow loading times. Hence implementing quality assurance measures to avoid such problems ensures that the app runs smoothly across multiple devices/OSs and provides pleasant experiences to all users.
Advancing Content Management Systems
CMSs are indispensable as they offer various features to create and supervise content. And you may need to add new features to the system that would support particular business needs. In this case, you should also create a corresponding section within the CMS. Since this is where content managers/administrators can add new information or functionality.
Extending the capabilities of an existing platform can significantly impact its performance, so it is critical to test the new additions and the whole system to avoid unexpected errors or malfunctions. Code can make miracles and break an entire infrastructure. So you need a devoted QA team to take care of compatibility, integrations, security, etc., thus averting technical debt.
Upgrading Customer Relationship Management Systems
Customization is necessary to make a CRM fit a company’s unique operations and existing solutions, e.g., accounting or inventory management software. While paramount, custom CRMs are intricate and require dedicated developers and proficient QA engineers. Software testing services must cover both functional testing, such as investigating the system’s various features, and non-functional testing, like evaluating the system’s performance under load.
Also, training and support are essential for ensuring that the CRM is used to its full potential. QA specialists can create documentation that will allow to better understand the product, further maintain it, and even open new improvement pathways. Thus, testing not only ensures that your software is fully operational and truly valuable, but also makes a solid base for further innovation.
Maximizing Custom Software Potential Calls for QA Professionals
Building something unique is always a risk: you do not really have a point of reference, just a fresh idea and probably a whole lot of questions. So maybe the ones to review the product should be those who worked on it? This misconception is still present, and it is among the main causes of low-quality software.
Developers should not be burdened with extra work. PMs often lack the needed knowledge. Stakeholders simply have a different area of expertise. And beta testers commonly carry out only superficial evaluations. None of these options would be enough to perfectly realize your software vision. For a supreme project, you need experienced, skilled, committed, and creative specialists.
All of these you can find in a professional QA team.
Superior Software Quality Through Expertise and Experience
Even when external QA engineers work on custom features, they rely on knowledge obtained from projects with related peculiarities. Thus, they can deduct what approach to take and how to modify it to deliver what you need. Software QA and testing professionals also have sufficient dexterity to fully grasp product specifics. This allows them to design and adapt testing strategies to cover all potential defects.
Fresh Ideas with Objectivity & Unbiased Evaluation
Outsourced QA experts are independent of the development team and can provide an objective perspective on the software’s quality. An unbiased perspective helps them identify defects that developers may miss due to their familiarity with the code. QA engineers may even offer alternative enhancement procedures or changes to advance your product even more.
Optimized SDLC with Saving Time and Resources
Dedicated QA benefits software development by preventing defects in early SDLC stages, thus saving time and resources. QA specialists focus on testing activities, keeping distractions away from your teams, and collaborate with developers to reduce issues and ensure their prompt resolution. This decreases the overall cost of development by minimizing the need for expensive bug fixes and rework.
Worry-Free Development via Risk Mitigation
Even during the initial phase of testing strategy organization, QA teams can foresee high-risk areas. As they also cooperate with developers, QA engineers can track the software’s progress and pinpoint aspects that require increased attention or modification. And by conducting meticulous analysis and testing, QA experts can help identify errors before they become critical problems, allowing for efficient remedies.
Strong Reputation due to Secured Compliance
Compliance with security, privacy, and accessibility standards, among others, secures your product’s reputation and enhances its performance. And with customized features, it may be a bit tricky to align certain functionalities with specific industry or regulatory norms. Besides validating your project’s adherence to established rules, QA specialists rely on rich experience to “connect” your personalized product to best practices.
Steady Positive UX with Software Consistency
QA teams develop testing strategies that cover all aspects of the SDLC to provide operational consistency. From integration to system testing, it is critical to ensure that your feature runs smoothly with the entire infrastructure and that the infrastructure runs smoothly with your feature. Think of it as a binary, co-dependent network that requires testing on both sides to guarantee optimal outcomes.
Improved Customer Satisfaction via Tailored QA Strategies
Skilled QA experts are critical for delivering a superior product, especially when it comes to customized, i.e., unique features. Only proficient QA specialists can align your business goals and consumer needs, thus optimizing end-user experience. Rigorous testing enhances UX, thus fostering loyalty, building strong customer relationships, and driving business growth by increasing retention, positive reviews, and referrals.
Reduced Support Costs through Stability
QA professionals can increase customer satisfaction and help you build a reliable and secure platform that is easier to maintain. Comprehensive testing processes permit locating and addressing issues early in the development cycle, minimizing the risk of costly support requests and downtime. This is particularly important for software that operates with custom features/extensions since errors may originate from both ends.
Better Software Due to Effective Collaboration
As QA specialists collaborate with developers, both teams can better understand software requirements, creating more user-friendly products. They can efficiently find solutions to challenging situations and identify improvement opportunities. Even PMs benefit from regular updates on the testing process and development status, enabling better software management via informed decision-making about timelines, budgets, and resources.
Continuous Improvement with QA Talents
By monitoring the SDLC, QA engineers identify improvement areas to optimize testing and quality assurance practices. They can also offer automation strategies to minimize repetitive tasks and reduce development time and effort. The combination of the above advantages with ongoing QA support lets you continuously advance your software and exceed user expectations. Thus, you can build a strong reputation and long-term relationships with customers.
To Sum Up
The octopus species has been the apex predator for nearly 300 million years. And they are so fascinating to us precisely due to their unique abilities. So if you want to pique users’ interests and be simply fascinating, adaptation via customization is what you need.
And just like nature perfected the octopus form through trial and error, you should perfect your software with QA professionals (it will take way less time).