You might have heard someone refer to our QA Team at Jackrabbit in your discussions about our software.  If you haven’t been introduced into the development world, this will be very new to you. It was really new to me when I started at Jackrabbit! These folks are extremely important to Jackrabbit and we’re giving you an inside look at this team.

First of all, QA means quality assurance. The ‘official’ definition would be something like: quality assurance is any systematic process of checking to see whether a product or service being developed is meeting specified requirements. Basically, this team tries to test the software before we hand it out to you.

Any new buttons, reports, functions, and features released from our enhancement list have been tested by our QA Team. And then they’re tested again. This part of the enhancement process is huge. We want to catch any glitches or bugs before you.  Our developers are human so they make mistakes from time to time. This team is there to catch as many errors in the code as possible.

There are two different types of testing our QA Team does – positive and negative. Positive testing is when our team goes through the feature and see if everything works as it should. They run through a series of scenarios and double check the right information is being used and shown. This part of the process is pretty easy to double check. Negative testing is a little tougher. They try and think of all the ways to break the feature. They take a hammer to it [don’t worry, only a few keyboards have been broken :)] and think outside of the box. What if a field requires a name but the user enters a colon as the name – what happens then?

There is no way we can be 100% bug free. It just can’t happen. So if something does make it through, we make sure we don’t have that situation again. Nobody could have thought to test that and there’s always going to be something that we can improve. This is something all software companies are challenged with – we aren’t perfect.

The QA Team has four people: Kelli Tesh, Karen White, Kristi Deese and Ann Binns. These folks are dedicated to QA’ing the software.

Here’s what they have to say about being on this team:

“I enjoy working on the QA team because we all bring something different to the table and are able to use that different knowledge collaboratively to help our team assure that Jackrabbit continues to be the best software in the industry!” -Kelli Tesh

“I enjoy working with the QA team because it provides an opportunity to work with a group of people who share a desire to make our software even better for our customers. We each share a genuine excitement when an enhancement makes it from design to deployment.” -Ann Binns

Over the last 10 years,  Jackrabbit has continued to grow. Our QA used to be done by our developers. We are excited to have this team who is dedicated to just testing the software so our developers can continue to write new code for features and functions!