Dive into the intricate world of software QA. Understand their importance, processes and best practices to ensure the highest quality and reliability in your software solutions.
Software Quality Assurance (QA) works by continuously testing and monitoring software products throughout the development process. In essence, the role of software QA services is to push the boundaries of an application in multiple directions and provide companies with valuable insights that lead to higher quality products.
QA processes introduce the “human factor” into code-based testing by creatively anticipating what the user would do, even if it goes beyond the application's purposes. This way, software developers can fully understand all its functionalities and integration points.
Today, organizations of all sizes work with QA and Testing services to ensure that their product is properly designed and implemented and is capable of performing beyond expectations. Ultimately, this mitigates downtime and errors in the final product while providing a much better user experience.
The main stages of the quality control process
Project
The quality control process begins as soon as product specification begins. This test-driven development approach is crucial for tracing initial user flows from the earliest stages of development. Guided by the bones of the product, the development team will save a lot of time and effort.
Implementation
Lasting quality is guaranteed by applying thorough and organized unit testing. As the project takes shape, some exploratory testing can be performed and continue to refine the product flow. The key is to quickly combine a broad Continuous Integration (CI) process with crowdsourcing and automation, generating high-quality data and preventing problems from snowballing.
Test
Finding problems means fixing them. Adopting a strategic triage approach will help the development team prioritize each task and categorize them accordingly. Tracking all tasks and their progress is essential for the project to move forward without ignoring relevant concerns.
Maintenance
Lasting quality is guaranteed by applying thorough and organized unit testing. As the project takes shape, some exploratory testing can be performed and continue to refine the product flow. The key is to quickly combine a broad Continuous Integration (CI) process with crowdsourcing and automation, generating high-quality data and preventing problems from snowballing.
Benefits of adopting a quality control process
Anticipates fatal problems
Problems that arise with certain software, especially those that operate with sensitive data, can lead to communication failures, massive blackouts and data leaks. Testing and quality control ensure there is no room for error.
Saves money
Prevention is key and early detection of bugs and problems avoids large costs in the future. It is much more expensive to fix problems when the development process is advanced and even worse if the product is finished.
Focuses on unparalleled user experience
UX guarantees the delivery of impeccable software: simple, easy to use, intuitive, error-free and efficient. A detailed testing process will ensure that customers receive a valuable, reliable and highly interactive end product.
Inhibits targeted attacks
Continuous testing maintains and defends software security by eliminating weaker code snippets and errors. Reliable and trustworthy products should always be a priority.
5 Types of Quality Control Testing
Characteristics of a great quality control process
Integrated
A great QA process integrates well into the development team's workflow throughout the product lifecycle. This way, testing protocols can occur across all tools and platforms used by different teams.
Custom
Different projects require different quality control solutions that meet the company's needs. Applying more quality control does not always translate into better products – driving each process with specific goals is much more valuable than piling on too many of them in the hope of getting better results.
Automated
From rapid testing to prioritizing results, QA tasks have always been somewhat manual. It is the development team's job to effectively identify what can and should be automated.
Functional cross
Every team and department in a company has an interest in the quality control process. A cross-functional input approach will introduce higher quality insights into the project and lead to a much better end result.
Anticipatory
Every company changes its needs and processes from time to time. A great quality control process anticipates growth and is designed to provide scalability and flexibility to adapt to new scenarios.
Measured
What is measured, improves. Collecting quality insights, identifying key metrics, and using them strategically will have a huge impact on all product, team, and process-related decisions.
Getting started with quality control services
Companies often lack in-house personnel with access to the right amount of time or resources needed to conduct comprehensive quality control testing. Today, countless companies rely on software testing and quality control outsourcing to increase the quality of their products, relying on an expert overview from skilled professionals.
