The importance of quality assurance in development cycles

[#1]

What is quality assurance?

Quality assurance (QA) is any systematic process of defining whether a product or service meets specified requirements.

It is defined as part of quality management that ensures that requirements will be fulfilled. Quality assurance is twofold – internally to management and externally to customers and third parties.

Quality assurance aims to fulfill front- and back-end processes competently and fluidly; by delivering the intended product or service on time and within budget and going above and beyond in all transactions and interactions with the consumer.

Contrary to what circulates about the roles and responsibilities of the QA team regarding product quality before or after software deployment, it is of utmost importance that the whole team is responsible for product quality. The best practice is for development and testing to go in parallel. When this is not the case, discrepancies and interruptions will occur, leading to poor product quality.

There are three primary stages in product development, where we will be discussing the primary responsibilities of the QA team in each step.

1. Initial Stage

2. Product Development Stage

3. Supporting and Scaling Stage

The most important responsibility for the QA in the initial stage is product requirements analysis.

A bug discovered at this stage is five times less costly before product development and ten times less costly than a bug found at deployment.

At the product development stage, the QA role will include but not be limited to the below six significant responsibilities.

1. ensure features comply with technical and business requirements

2. set up a proper quality management system

3. select tools for manual and automated testing

4. Create autotests for specific parts of the system

5. Maintain documentation and system description

6. Inform about release dates and organize product demos

When it comes to the supporting and scaling phase, the significant responsibility of the QA engineer is dealing with four major players:

1. Analyses user customer experience, gather feedback and compare user interaction with a planned journey.

2. develops for product owner detailed acceptance criteria for user stories, modify or improve existing user stories by providing feedback about testing experience and collecting feedback from the product owner.

3. Informs the development team about the discovered issues and bugs, monitors bug fixing, and makes sure that users no longer face problems.

4. Presents ideas and insights to the development team generated by the analysis, so they can be added to the backlog if approved.

In a competitive market for software development, stand out by giving a quality product. Fortunately, quality assurance works in boosting client confidence, especially when you are looking to build long-term relationships and customer loyalty. Quality assurance prevents corporate emergencies, particularly when implementing testing that guarantees no room for errors. And most importantly, it saves you money and effort. A faulty application might cost your client a fortune. Proper QA testing will allow the discovery of potential bugs or issues that might occur in the future. 

[tony Stark]

The importance of quality assurance in development cycles is very well explained in this article, Andreas. The cost of defects and unsuccessful applications can be very costly to your business. Outsourcing software testing is a great way for your company to develop market-ready services and products. Contracting a quality assurance testing company rather than hiring your own QA manager outside of your field of expertise during the early stages of your organization might save you a lot of money.

Your workforce may be specialized in particular subjects, but the expanding demands of the environment necessitate the addition of professionals from other fields.

Here is an interesting article on the Inhouse QA and Outsourced QA: https://bit.ly/3z4OKKO