O guia essencial de controle de qualidade de software

The Essential Guide to Software QA

Unlock the secrets of flawless software with our essential QA guide! From understanding test types, to automating repetitive tasks, to ensuring user satisfaction, dive deep into the world of quality assurance.

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As any experienced development team knows, software quality assurance (QA) is an essential practice for building high-quality products. Not to be confused with quality control, quality control is a comprehensive practice that goes beyond just identifying and fixing bugs. Of course, this entails testing software at various stages of the software development lifecycle, but it also means deeply analyzing the process itself for improvements.

Automação e controle de qualidade

What is software quality control?

Software quality assurance is the process of evaluating whether a product and the process through which it was built comply with various quality standards. Thus, quality control testing focuses on verifying that the product has met these quality requirements, while ensuring that the development processes are the best to meet them.

For some time, software engineers themselves were responsible for performing quality control tests on their own products. However, doing so did not provide the best results as developers were too involved with the applications they were building, leading them to ignore many bugs and faulty practices. That's why the best software development teams have dedicated QA engineers to handle quality assurance.

Before proceeding, it is important to insist that quality control differs from quality control (QC), although they may appear to be very similar practices. While both aspire to limit the number of bugs present in the final product, QA takes a more proactive approach than QA. This is because QA tries to improve the development process to prevent bugs from happening, while QA is more about catching bugs in the software before release. Thus, quality control is more about testing and inspection, while quality control is more about auditing and defining processes.

The stages of quality control

Another big change that quality assurance has undergone over the years is how involved it actually is in the development process. Not long ago, development teams viewed QA as just an additional step in the development process. In fact, QA used to be the last stage before launch, a last step in the development checklist to ensure the product had as few defects as possible.

This means that the quality control process works on different aspects of the software, depending on the stage of development the project is at. This results in different stages of quality control that serve different purposes. These steps include the following:

#1 Requirements Analysis.

Since QA is about preventing bugs from occurring, it's natural for QA engineers to begin their work early in development. Therefore, QA professionals evaluate project requirements to verify that they are clear, concise, complete and testable. This not only helps with preventing bugs, but also makes it easier to perform other QA tasks later.

#2 Test Planning

Once requirements are aligned with quality standards, it is time for the QA team to plan testing. This means defining the QA strategy that testing will follow while also determining the scope, budget, schedule, test types, bug tracking processes, reporting techniques, roles, responsibilities and any other factors necessary to perform the tests themselves.

#3 Test Project

After planning everything related to testing, it's time to build the tests themselves. The idea is to cover all software requirements, so QA engineers have to outline the conditions and test steps they will use to evaluate different features. Additionally, the test design should also result in a list of expected results. Finally, QA professionals also prepare the testing environment to resemble the production environment.

#4 Test Execution

All designed tests take place here, including unit tests, API tests, UI tests, manual tests and automated tests, among others. QA engineers generate detailed reports with all the information collected from these tests – data that goes into a tracking system to ensure bugs are handled properly.

#5: Retest and Regression Testing

More than one round of testing is required to ensure the highest quality of the resulting software. This is why QA engineers step in once again after bugs are fixed to retest the product. This instance is highly important as QA professionals perform regression testing to ensure that the fixes didn't break anything or change anything covered in the requirements.

#6: Launch Testing

The final phase of quality control occurs when the team releases the product. QA engineers take that product and analyze whether the expected functionality and all requirements are adequately met. The idea is to ensure that the building is stable and operational.

Quality assurance activities

Given that quality assurance encompasses the entire software development lifecycle, it is natural that it encompasses many activities. We've already mentioned a few when explaining the different stages of QA, but it's worth reviewing the most critical ones throughout the development process. These quality control activities include the following:

  • Create a plan for carrying out the QA process that describes the approach, testing tasks, schedule, and roles.
  • Have a multiple testing strategy that evaluates the product from multiple and different perspectives to discover all possible problems and increase final quality.
  • Enforce adherence to appropriate software development processes. This involves monitoring development itself to check whether engineers are using best practices. It also means evaluating the product as it grows to ensure it meets the requirements defined in the early stages.
  • Control changes by validating change requests and monitoring their implementation to ensure that none of these changes end up having a negative effect on overall quality. This also means performing regression testing to see if changes and fixes affected unrelated functionality or features.
  • Perform quality control audits to ensure that development tasks followed the predefined process and reported activities were performed in accordance with regulations and quality standards.
  • Maintain records and reports through detailed documentation on test and audit results, change requests, issues, and any other data that can be used to improve the process on future projects.

Quality assurance techniques

In addition to the steps and activities involved in quality assurance, we should mention that there are several techniques to achieve the final objective of QA. It's true that most QA teams rely on auditing as their preferred method for handling QA, but they often combine this technique with one of the many available.

  • Auditing: One of the most used techniques, auditing consists of evaluating the product to ensure that it meets quality requirements. It also involves taking a look at the development process to make sure the team followed best practices.
  • Code inspection: A formal technique, tests the product to check for bugs. It is conducted based on predefined rules, checklists and criteria. Typically, it is best if the inspector is not one of the engineers building the product.
  • Design inspection: As the name suggests, this technique deals with analyzing various aspects of software design, including functionality, UI, logic, performance, error handling, testability, and extensibility, among other things.
  • Functional testing: A technique that checks the functionality of the product without considering how it works.
  • Path testing: A structural testing method whereby QA engineers review the source to find all possible executable paths. This helps determine which of the software's various entry and exit points may have problems.
  • Reviewing: Meetings to review the product and seek feedback from stakeholders.
  • Simulation: This technique makes QA engineers recreate the real-life scenarios that users will encounter when using the software. This way, they can analyze how the product behaves.
  • Standardization: Although tests cannot be standardized (since projects are different from each other), the testing approach and practices related to quality control certainly can. Thus, this technique focuses on the tools and workflow that the team uses to conduct QA testing on different projects.
  • Static Analysis: Technique that involves evaluating the code without executing the program. It is often conducted using automated tools. Reverse engineering is probably the best-known form of static analysis.
  • Stress testing: Through this technique, engineers overload the system with tasks to check its performance under unusual conditions (i.e. heavy loads).
  • Peer review: This technique pairs the developer with a QA engineer to review the code. This way, the QA specialist can understand the logic used by the developer while making suggestions about possible improvements.

How to integrate quality control into your development

#1: Analyze your current development practices

(Including quality control tasks, if any). QA engineers need to start by understanding where you are. That's why they will analyze your project, development processes, resources, tools, know-how and overall workflow. This will give them a clearer picture of how your team works and where the weaknesses are.

#2: Build the QA Process

If you already have a quality control process in place, you may just need a few tweaks to maximize its efficiency. But there may be a need for a complete redesign (or creating a quality control process if you don't have one). Doing so involves thinking about the specifics of the process, its metrics, the necessary functions and tools, and the inherent risks of making all these changes.

#3 Implement the new quality control process

Implementing the new process can be tricky, as you are trying to introduce new habits into a team that has its own. That's why it's important to hold training and meetings with the development team so they know what they can expect. It is even more important if you are bringing in an external QA team, as this can be a stressful situation that can cause anxiety.

#3 Monitor implementation results

You can't implement a new way of doing things and expect it to produce the best results immediately. That's why you need to monitor how the quality control process is working to make sure it's achieving the goals you set at the beginning. This may take some time, as you will certainly have to make adjustments along the way – but that's what quality control is all about!

The only path to high quality

Gone are the days when you could do without the problem-solving skills of QA engineers on your development team. Today, there is no way to meet customer and market requirements for software if you do not have a proper quality assurance process in place. This means bringing a series of strategic activities to the entire software development lifecycle.

Contact us today and let's discuss your needs and goals!

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