Introduction

Quality assurance (QA) testing is the process of ensuring that your service is of the highest possible quality for your users. Testing uses different tools, technologies and frameworks to prevent issues with your service and to ensure great user experience for all users.

Testers will provide assurance through the designing, developing and execution of tests on new and existing services. Key responsibilities of this role is to assure quality and consistent attention to detail in all testing performed.

In the NHSBSA we test to our five core frameworks:

• Acceptance
• Accessibility
• API
• Compatibility
• Performance

All of our tests are created, developed, executed and maintained to our test standards.
These standards can be found on the Test Community confluence and sharepoint websites.

Acceptance Testing

Acceptance testing deals with the functional testing of user stories to fulfil acceptance criteria.

Acceptance criteria are the conditions that software must meet to be accepted by a user.

Testing these conditions will include happy and unhappy paths, field validations and boundary value tests.

All of our acceptance tests within the NHSBSA test community are created in user centric BDD using cucumber whether this is for manual or automated tests.

The tool choice for these BDD scripts comes from the NHSBSA Test Tech Stack.​​​​​​​

Our BDD tests are centred around the users and their behavioural needs and requirements hence our tests are focused from the perspective of the user and not a third person.

All wording is in clear natural english language and does not include technical or test jargon or speech, for example in our tests we don’t press this or click that like in more traditional test plans and scripts.

We write our tests as the user would express a scenario or situation, for example:

Given I am on the NHSBSA PPC website
When I want to buy a 12 month PPC by card
Then I will able to buy a 12 month PPC by card

Accessibility Testing

New regulations came into force for public sector bodies on 23 September 2018. These regulations meant all public sector websites and mobile apps must be accessible in four key areas:

• perceivable, operable, understandable and robust

The full name of the regulations for reference is the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

The 2018 regulations build on the existing obligations to people who have a disability under the Equality Act 2010 (or the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 in Northern Ireland). This states that all UK service providers must consider ‘reasonable adjustments’ for disabled people.

To ensure we meet this legislation an accessibility framework was developed and this has become one of the core test frameworks the test community use to ensure every product or service is accessible.

We test all of our services to ensure they meet the latest published WCAG standard to ‘AA’ standard as well as ensuring our services can be used by anyone with accessibility needs.

API Testing

API (Application Programming Interface) testing aims to determine whether the APIs that are developed meet expectations when it comes to functionality.

These tests built in automated form help to ensure all API’s used by services are fit for purpose.

Compatibility Testing

This testing deals ensures our services are compatible and work on a variety of different browsers, tablets and phones.

The need to perform Compatibility testing is linked to the following requirements:

• Ability to provide stakeholder’s with information about their application regarding functionality, usability and consistency.

• Ability to analyse the system in different OS environments as well as with different mobile devices (Phones, Tablets).

• Ability to conform to the following GDS Service Standards.

  • Standard 6 : Evaluate tools and systems - the evaluation and use of tools for your system and development environment.

  • Standard 10 : Be able to test the end-to-end service in an environment identical to that of the live version, including on all common browsers and devices, and using dummy accounts and a representative sample of users.

  • Standard 13 : To pass the beta and live assessments you also need to show that the service is responsive and works on mobile devices.

Performance Testing

Performance testing determines how the stability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness of an application holds up under a given workload.

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