The spectre of the new release

Who has not experienced this before? You choose a specific cloud application to make your life a little easier. The application fits well with the wishes of the users and everyone is satisfied. Until the release ghost comes around the corner with a new release...

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Help! A new release...

Useful functionalities suddenly disappear, new functionalities prove clumsy, and the customized structure of the application is illogical. Users lose their way within the application and the process supported by the application stagnates.

Be it a test tool or any other application. When the vendor delays releasing new releases for too long, it will cause annoyance or irritation and people will start looking at alternatives.

Having learned by trial and error, the focus then moves beyond functionality. The manner and frequency of releasing new releases is also considered.

Support for the test tool

As a test manager, you have carefully chosen a test tool. You have put a lot of energy into supporting the way the test process works and the workflow of your test tool. Application managers, test coordinators and key-users work fully with the test tool you have chosen. And then after six months, the vendor comes out with a major release.

As outlined above, a release can wipe out all support for the chosen method. And that puts you as a test manager in a very difficult position. How do you go about resolving this? How do you win back the confidence of the testers regarding the chosen test tool? And perhaps more importantly, are you yourself still able to work with your chosen test tool?

Not only can this cause a delay within your projects, but it will have to be reported to upper management. Time you could have better spent completing your test cycles.

Testersuite vs the release ghost

The situation outlined above is an everyday occurrence. The Testersuite team regularly encounters such situations with organizations looking for a good testing tool. An important question we then get asked is, "How does Testersuite handle new releases?"

We fully understand that maintaining the support created is extremely important for the continuity of the testing process. Based on this understanding, we at Testersuite believe that new releases of our testing tool should be manageable.

This is why we release every two weeks. This makes new and adapted functionalities as well as changes in the interface easy for users to adopt. This means that there is hardly any disruption to the ongoing testing process. Another advantage is that changes and extensions desired by customers can be realized quickly.

Faster recovery

Of course, sometimes things go wrong. Our users may experience a change as unpleasant or undesirable. Because we make a new release available every fourteen days, we are able to solve these kinds of issues quickly. This prevents loss of support or disruption of the testing process for our users.

Investing in quality

You may wonder why not all cloud vendors choose to release new releases on a regular basis. The answer to that is simple. If a vendor does not invest enough in the quality of the application and the delivery process, then rolling out new releases very frequently is going to lead to major problems.

At Testersuite , we have been investing in quality for years. This enables us to roll out releases with bug fixes and new features to our customers every two weeks, without down-time.