How Quality Assurance Protects the Software Development Process
Quality assurance supports software companies to meet their client demands and expectations. And also is a way of preventing errors and defect bugs in the software development process.
Overview of the quality assurance
Quality assurance service is a systematic process to ensure the frontend and backend development satisfies specific requirements and quality standards. It involves testing requirements during the development process until the project is completed. This testing phase is critical that allows the software development company to move on to the next lifecycle stages. Following are quality assurance steps:
- Requirements analysis
- Test planning
- Test design
- Test execution and defect bug
- Regression testing
- Reporting
A software product should be compatible with a range of vital factors to be considered as a high-grade product:
- Performance — the ability to function smoothly under a specified workload with accurate data and calculations.
- Extensibility — the ability to change and adjust to the existing project without damaging it
- Usability — A simple and clear interface
- Security — The product should be able to protect personal data through authorization and authentication techniques
Why are software quality assurance companies necessary?
7 benefits of quality assurance in software development
- Save money and effort: A faulty software could cost a lot of money on the clients and users, as the more problems occur, the more customers losing their trust in the development team.
- Prevents corporate emergencies: Bugs in the corporate software might occur system blackouts, communication breakdowns, or even missing data.
- Boosts client’s confidence: Through quality assurance service, clients will receive a high quality of performance, which creates long-term working relationships and improves customer loyalty.
- Enhances user experience: User experience is the element in the success or failure of a software product. Better quality assurance, better performance of the software, fewer bugs/errors, which increase user retention.
- Creates more profit: Software quality assurance processes are vital factors that determine whether you can sell it at a profit price or not.
- Improves customer satisfaction: As mentioned above, quality assurance advantages boost client’s confidence and enhances user experience, which, as a result, will improve customer satisfaction.
- Promotes efficiency and productivity: Avoiding constant errors or bugs can decrease the time-consuming and challenging it to fix. Being developed through a quality assurance system from the start of the project will enable the software development team to operate smoothly and productively.
Quality assurance testing methodologies
Quality assurance testing methodologies are defined as strategies that meet client requirements:
- Focus on the User Experience testing: As testing at all levels of the project is crucial, UX design is carefully tested by a dedicated development team to ensure the highest performance of the software.
- Automation and continuous integration testing: Automation is crucial, that it provides fast feedback to detect errors quickly and locate them more easily. This allows software developers to process speedily while keeping the best quality standards.
- The Shift-Left approach testing: this methodology helps IT developers to detect bugs sooner, which saves time and money and also ensures a good relationship between developers on the team, speeds up the delivery of the product, and allows more excellent test coverage.
- Bug prevention: these steps help the IT engineers to defects and keep bugs out of the software ecosystem, and minimize failures, and produce the highest quality of software.
- Security testing: Identify threats in the system that software engineers check and keep the data to stay confidential.
Quality assurance approaches
The quality assurance approaches to addressing the highest quality of software that can deliver to customers:
- The total quality management approach is one of the methods in the quality assurance process, which creates an ethical culture and behavior. This approach can guarantee product quality from the beginning of the project.
- The benchmarking approach can identify the weak spots and determine the methods for error prevention.
- The defect management approach is usually based on client demands which software developers can defect the noncorresponding features.
- The attribute approach includes six characteristics which are functionality, reliability, usability, maintainability, and portability.
Software quality assurance and the risk of errors in the software development
A software error is a failure or flaw in software development that prevents the application from functioning. Software error occurs mostly from human mistakes in software design and coding. As a result, quality assurance testers are a vital role to spot the mistakes quickly and document appropriately so that software developers can fix the bugs and deliver top-quality software to the customers.
Businesses should outsource quality assurance testing
- Avoid failure: quality assurance systems that exist to make software development run more smoothly, minimize the chances of defective products before releasing to the market.
- Create quality culture: Software quality assurance is the first layer in the process, which involves monitoring the development teams to ensure the team is adhering to the quality assurance requirements.
- Better development process: through quality assurance service, developers can test and identify potential advancements, software architects are able to assess the functionality of the applications.
- Company-wide results: Understanding the quality of the software is beneficial in productivity by gathering metrics of software processes, also clearly given a project’s status to predict its completion time accurately.
Approaching software quality assurance standards
Quality assurance standards are a complete set of actions in the testing process to provide the highest quality of software products and services. Some of the most outstanding standards are listed below:
- ISO 9000: based on seven quality management principles which are customer focus, leadership, evidence-based decision making, process approach, engagement of people, improvement, and relationship management.
- CMMI level: CMMI stands for capability maturity model integration which is employed to direct process improvement throughout a project, department, or an entire organization.
- Test maturity model integration: this model focuses on maturity levels helps in the evaluation and improvement of the testing process.
