Quality Assurance: What is it?

 

In the waterfall model, the software is built and then passed on to the QA team. The QA team will review the software and prepare a feedback report. This report will be sent back to the development team in order to fix, modify or make necessary changes to the software. 

In an agile model, QA teams work in collaboration with agile team members, so that the improvements to the software can be made then and there itself. 

QA plays an important role in determining the quality of software before it is released. In this article, you will get to know about the relevance of quality assurance.

What is quality assurance?

Quality Assurance (QA) is a process to carry on the software development activities as per the standard quality guidelines defined for developing a software product.

Every phase of the software development is closely monitored in order to check whether the design and functionality is being developed as per the customer requirements. Depending upon the situational context, software can be built for internal purposes to scale up productivity or external purposes, where a customer wants a specific software to be built.

A well-defined cycle:

QA process has four steps that form the core parts of the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle. The steps are as mentioned below:

·         Plan -The process related objectives should be planned and established by the organization. Processes need to be properly determined in order to deliver a high-quality product.

·         Do - Testing and development of processes take place in order to refine them

·         Check - Processes need to be monitored and modified in order to check whether the predetermined objectives are met

·         Act - To achieve improvements in the processes, a QA tester should implement necessary actions as and when required.

QA best practices:

1. The significance of the two-tier approach: It takes a lot of time to find issues through exhaustive system tests. In a two-tier approach, the first tier is activated each time a commit is made to the code base.Rapid validation of developer changes takes place through these triggers, and as sanity tests are also used, changes can be executed within a few minutes.

The second-tier approach applies functions and exhaustive regression testing automatically when no changes are being made by the developers. In this manner, the QA team will have more time to test changes.

2. Involving a devoted security testing team: In certain scenarios, clients would like to use their software product through Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. Somehow, if security vulnerabilities are discovered by users         on SaaS platforms, then chances are the users might not show any further interest. QA teams must take accountability for involving a devoted security testing team that can carry out penetration testing on stable versions.

Before the testing phase begins, it would be way better if the QA team can provide the required information pertaining to the new features that may be included in the upcoming product releases.Once proper information is gained, then security vulnerabilities can be tested in a more comprehensive manner.

3. Involving a devoted performance testing team: Once a product is stable enough, then the next step would be to conduct performance testing. QA teams will be in a better position to understand the performance of the new versions and features and if there are any performance related issues, then it can be ably tackled.           

If the development team introduces a new set of features that do not affect the performance, then it is sufficient enough to perform regression tests. On the contrary, if the product performance is getting affected by new features, then new performance tests need to be written and executed.

Conclusion: After reading this article, you might have obtained basic level knowledge on quality assurance, which provides a base for further research on quality assurance. If you want to get connected with a specialized QA team, who can help you steer clearly through your software development project by providing you with specific quality metrics that counts, then just visit a globally renowned software testing services company.

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology-specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.