Take a moment to think about your past experience. There have likely been instances when a surprise software glitch, unexpected disruption, or another complication irritated you while trying to finish a project. Most can also empathize with the aggravation involved when using slow, cumbersome, or faulty software.
Suppose you had a procedure that removed guesswork from your projects and ensured you deliver slick, quality, functional, and secure software solutions. It exists and in one survey, 99% of the population polled felt that it was very important.
To better understand the Quality Assurance process, we must first understand the following:
Table of Content
- What Is quality assurance?
- Quality assurance in software
- Best practices for quality assurance
- The Process of QA testing
- Conclusion
What Is Quality Assurance?
Quality assurance testing, or QA testing, is an essential process in the software development life cycle. But what do these two terms actually signify, and how much importance do they hold when combined?
Let's analyze the term "quality assurance" before we discuss further how this process is done and what are its best practices.
Quality: Quality's core meaning is to fulfill the customer's expectations and requirements. This is the best level of "quality" your company can deliver. Assurance: An expression of confidence in an approach, good, or service. This section simply indicates that a company ensures the finest products and services are being delivered. So, the best would be to describe Quality Assurance or QA as determining the quality of any system or its components in order to adhere to specifications and customer requirements.
Now it’s time to learn about Quality Assurance in Software and outline some of its best practices.
Quality Assurance in Software
Software quality assurance ensures that IT products meet all business requirements in addition to users' requirements and detects any bugs or errors that may arise.
Although the purpose of software quality assurance seems to be to evaluate software on the basis of functionality, efficiency, and flexibility, software QA is not only about the quality of the software itself. Part of the quality assurance test should include a review of the process of designing, evaluating, and releasing the software as well.
A successful QA process causes all the members of a project team to work together better, resulting in quicker development time and reduced expenses. Take a look at these best practices for ensuring your QA process is effective.
Best Practices for Quality Assurance
It is imperative to implement an effective QA management system with tools and techniques to build bug-free products. Let’s discuss some of the best practices to improve QA testing.
Your quality assurance (QA) testing methodology ought to include manual testing as well as automated testing. Each aspect and stage of the product should be tested using the appropriate test type. Although the cloud makes for a great team collaboration and communication space, it is not suitable for testing and developing software. For them to conduct their software test, developers require that they have a safe area off the internet to conduct their test. Test procedures must be well-defined, planned, and documented. Effective planning involves developing quality and test plans for a project, which is meant to help project managers and give order by defining roles, tasks, and desired levels of quality. The Process of QA Testing
The Process of QA Testing
In an exemplary QA process, all stages of the software development cycle are covered, from analysis of requirements to ongoing support. To set up a thorough, inclusive Quality Assurance system, it is necessary to understand the stages involved.
Analysis of Requirements
It is impossible to get a project off the ground without a clear set of requirements. A QA specialist examines functional and non-functional aspects of the software to determine the scope of the project in addition to the software's specific characteristics so the QA process can be established.
In the end, the analysis must provide a set of clearly defined, coherent, detailed, and measurable requirements. The phases are not separated as such, but requirements could be altered at any time during the development process. Therefore, it is recommended to gather as many requirements as possible so they can be properly documented.
Test Plan
Test planning is dependent on the data that has been gathered during the requirements analysis phase. During the process of test planning, you must respond to some questions such as what should be tested, how to test, and who will test.
Test Design
In this phase, the goal is to determine how the test should be conducted. Here, test cases or test scenarios are created, according to what’s most appropriate for the project. Furthermore, the QA department maintains a record of the test scenarios and collects test data as required.
Test and Report Defects
After your application build becomes available, you can begin to find bugs in it! It's now time to plan your tests and find as many bugs as possible. During the process, test scripts are run, updated, and maintained. To manage defects effectively, all bugs detected are recorded in a defect-tracking database.
Retest and Regression Tests
The retesting process involves checking test cases that have been found to contain bugs as they are being executed. This stage also involves gathering and measuring key performance indicators (for example, test time, code coverage, etc.) to continuously enhance the QA testing process.
Release Tests
In this phase, test execution is completed, but other activities like reporting test results (qualitative and quantitative), collecting test completion matrices following important KPIs, and analyzing test results.
Conclusion
Giving up scalability, stability, and security does not make sense if you want software, apps, or cloud-based services to make a positive impression on your customers. QA Testing Services are designed to identify and fix the root causes of these and other types of vulnerabilities at an early stage.
The correct application of the best practices along with pragmatic test automation can reduce testing time, bring software to market more quickly, and make development more efficient.
By working with PixelQA, a Software QA Company, you can rest assured that your software or app will leave your users happy, allowing you to focus on enhancements rather than basic app performance, security, or functionality