As 2024 is coming to an end, the video streaming industry is slowly rebounding after a challenging period marked by layoffs and market consolidation. While things are starting to look more positive, the landscape is still characterized by tough competition and end users limiting their discretionary spending. In order to stay competitive in what is undoubtedly still a tough market, video streaming services need to find the balance between delivering exceptional quality and continuously upgrading and evolving their offerings. Quality assurance is a key piece of this process and can mark the difference between success and failure.

In this blog post, we will discuss how automated and manual testing should be used in combination to achieve both performance and cost saving objectives.

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Achieving comprehensive test coverage.

Effective quality assurance requires a strategic balance between automation and manual testing to maximize test coverage.

Automated testing excels at making the software development lifecycle more consistent and efficient by detecting issues early, which enables developers to address problems proactively. It is particularly useful for repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing QA engineers to focus on more intricate activities such as bug investigation, troubleshooting, and exploratory testing. Automation also accelerates test execution across multiple environments, helping to identify subtle issues like minor misalignments or overlooked text errors, which might escape human attention.

Manual testing, on the other hand, remains indispensable for areas where human intuition and contextual understanding are essential—such as assessing user interfaces, evaluating user experience, or testing scenarios that are challenging to replicate with scripts. While manual testing can be more resource-intensive, it complements automation by addressing gaps that require subjective analysis, ensuring a thorough quality assurance process. By leveraging the strengths of both approaches, video streaming companies can achieve broader and more reliable test coverage. This hybrid approach ensures that automation handles the bulk of routine testing while manual efforts focus on areas requiring human judgment, ultimately leading to better product quality and a more robust QA strategy.

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Streamlining your QA process to speed up time to market.

‍In software development, there is always a fine balance between reducing time to market and ensuring product quality. Automation is a key part of speeding up the testing process, since it enables QA teams to assess the stability and quality of a service earlier than what can be achieved with manual testing. Additionally, finding bugs in the early and middle stages of the development cycle reduces the cost of failure in the process, saving valuable time with earlier verifications. When developing a video service for deployment on multiple platforms, automated testing allows for parallel tests to be run on different platforms so that the build delivered by the development team can be verified quicker. The overall development time is reduced because automated testing allows for faster bug detection, which also makes the development cycle faster. When it comes to evolving the video service on an ongoing basis, running repeated automated tests provides confidence that no functionality is left untested.

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Layered automation and focused manual testing.

An effective QA strategy integrates end-to-end automated tests with automated testing at other critical layers, such as APIs and feature-specific functionalities, while also prioritizing manual efforts where human insight is indispensable. End-to-end automation validates the entire user journey, ensuring that workflows function seamlessly from the user interface (UI) to the underlying systems. API automation, on the other hand, ensures that individual services communicate effectively, verifying that the web API responds correctly to requests and handles edge cases reliably. Combining these approaches helps catch issues across multiple layers, preventing bugs from propagating into production.

In addition to pre-release testing, monitoring production environments is essential for maintaining quality. Automated monitoring tools can detect anomalies in real time, such as unexpected latency, errors, or performance bottlenecks, enabling teams to address potential problems before they impact users. By leveraging both automated monitoring and testing, you can focus manual efforts on high-value areas that require a different kind of human input. This approach enables QA teams to ensure that the product not only works as intended but also meets ever evolving user expectations.

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The role of service monitoring in quality assurance.

Monitoring should be seen as an integral component of the broader quality assurance process, serving as a continuous feedback loop to ensure service reliability and user satisfaction. It complements proactive testing by identifying issues like buffering, poor video quality, app crashes, or metadata inaccuracies in real-time, allowing teams to address them before they affect a significant audience. Monitoring also helps verify content delivery across devices and regions while tracking compliance with regional regulations and detecting security threats such as unauthorized access or piracy. 

Effective monitoring blends automated systems, which provide constant vigilance and rapid detection, with manual oversight, where human expertise interprets complex data patterns, verifies edge cases, and uncovers nuanced user experience issues. Insights from monitoring guide ongoing app performance optimization—such as reducing load times and ensuring consistent playback—and inform strategies for managing demand surges during live events or major content releases, ensuring a high-quality, reliable experience for users.

By applying a combination of automated and manual testing as well as comprehensive service monitoring, video streaming companies can ensure maximum test coverage while keeping costs and timelines at bay. To find out how Accedo can help you create a high quality, engaging video service, and get it to market quickly, please get in touch with a member of our team.‍