Quality Assurance or QA encompasses a wide range of activities within the realm of software. It certainly is not something that needs to be added at the end of software delivery or as a separate entity that should be ignored by developers. Everyone seeks high quality in every sphere of life – the idea of the quality, of course, differs for each person. Within the software, the dimensions or parameters of quality include reliability, ease of use, value for money, and meeting the purpose for which it was intended.
As a leading QA company we believe in the value of delivering high-quality software products – meaning those that satisfy our clients. Websites, web, and mobile applications could seemingly be the best, but unless the customer is satisfied, the product is not high quality. Hence, the question arises – how does one deliver a quality product that will satisfy the customer? We know that there is a process to actually delivering high-quality products.
The actual step of QA – A tester ensures through a series of tests that could be either automated or manual that the product is ready for high usage. Further, the process that developers must undertake such as code reviews, adequate unit and integration test coverage, and continuous delivery, also makes up for the QA process. There are some practices that work towards delivering high-quality software products, and as one of the best QA companies we list some of them here:
What Works Well?
Unfortunately today there are several software partners who use and propagate a large number of practices but which do not work – that is do not deliver high-quality software. It is necessary for all stakeholders to agree on what would constitute ‘high quality and this can be achieved by analyzing what the client would deem as high quality. It would help to check past reviews and determine whether the client feedback was positive or negative and work towards improving the quality based on the feedback.
A cohesive team – The development team must include at least one or two testers full-time. This ensures that testers remain involved in all phases of the process of development, which in turn eliminates the risk of a breakdown in communication between testers and developers.
Developers must conduct exploratory tests first – Prior to testers putting their test plan into action, developers must run some tests, which saves time on further testing since they would usually be able to find flaws fixable in real-time. Testers would then be able to dive straight into more detailed testing since the easily fixable issues would already be out of the way.
Automated tests – With exploratory testing completed, the next step is automated acceptance tests, which can be written either by developers or the testers, if the testers have the skills.
Code Reviews – Reviewing code ensures top quality of the code. It would look at aspects such as whether the code can be easily maintained and understood, not just immediately but in the future too. In addition, it is important to remember that code changes must include unit tests and functional or integration tests as well if coding is happening across APIs.
Continuous Delivery is necessary since it does have tangible and practical advantages – reduction in development costs while significantly enhancing quality.
In Conclusion:
There is no silver bullet that can ensure significantly improved quality with no ‘cost’, despite the stream of tools, design patterns, and development methods. Improving and delivering high-quality software must be a combined effort of all the stakeholders. Enhancing the efficacy of software testing is one of the best ways to significantly improve software quality. It makes business sense to partner with an expert service provider, who consistently learns and uses upgraded and contemporary tools and techniques for testing. Connect with us to work with the best in the industry and to ensure that your software products are of consistently high quality, each time.
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