QA for media and entertainment

This article focuses on the foundations of QA for media and entertainment. For more up-to-date trends, see our follow-up post “QA for media and entertainment: trends, challenges and solutions”, which dives into AI-driven QA, production monitoring, and performance risks.

Rapid digital adoption and changing user behavior have significantly reshaped the media and entertainment industry, pushing companies to rethink how digital experiences are delivered and tested.

Mobile applications have become a core distribution channel for media and entertainment products, significantly raising expectations for performance, usability, and content availability.

Within such a high demand for media and entertainment applications, ensuring flawless operation is a silver bullet. How can companies deliver impeccable software products and meet customers’ needs?

Quality assurance plays a key role in addressing these challenges. In this article, we explore:

• Tendencies of the industry
• QA as a must-have for media and entertainment solutions’ development
• A comprehensive software testing pattern for media and entertainment.

A new personalized era of media and entertainment

Within the modern market’s tenets and changed customer behavior, end users are geared towards enjoying media experiences uniquely adjusted to their personal preferences, contexts, and schedules.

Now, digitally empowered users want to exert greater control over what content to watch and when. This paves the way for developing software products in conformity with consumers’ wishes and needs. However, there is no one-size-fits-all way of how to gratify all the end users.

Companies should implement novel solutions that help make one’s media space personalized. Amid such innovations, AI algorithms are handy to gather personal data, process it, and provide consumers with new content.

OTT platforms have reshaped content consumption models, setting new expectations for availability, scalability, and seamless user experience. New distribution channels and devices continue to expand the media ecosystem, increasing the complexity of delivering consistent and reliable user experiences.

Gaming and eSports have become an integral part of the media and entertainment landscape, attracting massive audiences and placing high demands on platform stability.

Therefore, the media and entertainment sphere encompasses almost every person, and to make end users feel confident in their media experience, IT solutions are to be tested appropriately.

Why test this non-life-threatening sector?

Many companies believe an application not dealing with someone’s health or money doesn’t require proper testing before going to production. Despite the field’s non-responsibility for lives and non-guidance to certain standards, as eHealth and BFSI industries follow, the media and entertainment sector is one of the most complex ones. Within an extremely high market competition, it embraces dozens of content types and an extensive range of devices.

Industry reports show that global media and entertainment revenues continue to grow, intensifying competition across platforms.

Now, alongside improving content quality and increasing views and subscriptions, it is crucial to ensure IT solutions’ flawless operation to allure more customers. As the market contains thousands of options, end users have become more fastidious in choosing entertaining applications.

A seamless user experience and immersive content are the core concepts of media and entertainment business success. Software testing helps get confident in the delivery of upscale and competitive products providing end users with an impeccable digital entertainment journey.

Even strict budget and time constraints can’t prevent QA introduction. Due to Agile methodologies at the forefront, software testing adjusts to the circumstances and stays on guard of the IT products’ quality.

Applying holistic QA to soaring numbers of customers

Software testing is all about spotting defects sharply, enhancing IT solutions’ quality, and maintaining their adequate level. Alongside its apparent purpose, QA assists in deriving desired business objectives. Within the main media and entertainment goal of expanding consumption, quality assurance can help to reach it through proper and thorough testing services.

Improved CX is a cornerstone of media and entertainment business success, so a1qa’s experts recommend performing a comprehensive QA bundle.

• Functional testing. Flawless and accurate operation plays a pivotal role in any-industry applications. By executing a full scope (from smoke to exploratory testing), one can timely detect errors and verify novel functionality didn’t affect the developed features.
• Usability and GUI testing. Design and user-friendly interface are other aspects of end-users’ involvement. Usability testing results provide 360-degree visibility into how the customers see your applications and an understanding of the journey they want through the products.
• Mobile testing. As there is a tendency to use portable devices, it is lean to introduce mobile testing encompassing cross-platform and cross-browser testing. Harnessing real devices ensures glitches don’t appear on customers’ phones or tablets. Providing complex QA assistance to a developer of online casino games, a1qa leveraged 110+ mobile devices to cover all possible defects and guarantee consummate UX.
• Performance testing. With due regard to massive media and entertainment solutions usage, the number of consumers is steadily growing. Software behavior evaluation under an expected load, the upper capacity limits identification, simulating users’ actions — these all are about ensuring flawless real-life user journeys. However, performing some testing types is not enough. In order to get a high-end IT solution and stay at the top of this competitive market, companies should consider how QA processes are carried out. Keeping in mind all the extensive expertise, we do believe they require to be optimized and adjusted to modern working approaches.

Shift-left testing is one of the progressive strategies in an Agile world. Putting testing activities at the very project start, companies can avoid expensive post hoc defect fixing and provide a robust ground for thorough testing. Also, within a heavy workload and frequent releases, businesses should be faster while maintaining high software quality. Automated testing is a way out. Alongside streamlining testing processes and freeing up manual QA engineers, it contributes to QA costs reduction and time to market acceleration.

Summing up

The world is getting more and more personal, and the media and entertainment industry is no exception. Despite the field doesn’t deal with health or finances, it is more complex assembling thousands of users.

To reach a win-win solution between them, companies should consider trends amid consumers and innovative approaches to work. AI, OTT services, eSport, and voice streaming are getting more pervasive. Through a proper testing bundle and up-to-date working strategies, one can derive desired business outcomes and deliver upscale solutions meeting end-user needs.

Get hold of us to have a talk with a1qa’s experts on how to provide media and entertainment applications with stellar operation and improved CX.