It is immensely hard to define the quality and it can be simply explained as suitable to use or purpose. To meet all the needs and expectations of customers is all about Quality. It should be according to functionality, design, reliability & price of the product. Learn the Importance of Software Quality Assurance Nowadays.
What is Assurance?
Assurance is all about a positive declaration on a product or service. It can give confidence. It is the determination of a product or a service that it will work properly. Assurance provides a guarantee that the product will work perfectly as per the expectations or requirements.
What is Quality Assurance?
Quality assurance (QA) is a structured process to determine a product or service satisfies specified requirements.
The center of attention of a QA is improving the processes for delivering quality products to the end-user. Software products must define quality standards. An organization has to ensure that processes are efficient and effective as per the quality standards.
QA maintains set requirements to develop or manufacture reliable products.
A quality assurance system is the only way to enhance customer confidence and a company’s credibility. It makes a company to better compete with others
Importance of quality assurance:
Quality assurance supports an organization to develop products and services that meet the needs, expectations, and requirements of clients or customers. It constructs high-quality product offerings that make trust and loyalty with clients. A quality assurance program has the standards and procedures that help to prevent product defects before they arise.
How to complete Quality Assurance Process:
There is a defined cycle for QA, called PDCA cycle or Deming cycle. The phases of this cycle are:
- Plan
- Do
- Check
- Act
Deming cycle is repeated again and again to ensure that all the processes followed in the organization are evaluated and improved on a periodic basis.
Let’s talk about it
- Plan
- a company first should plan the process related to objectives.
- a company should determine the processes to deliver a high-Quality end product to the customer.
- Do
- development and testing of processes
- do changes in the processes if needed.
- Check
- Auditing of processes, modify the processes and check whether it meets the predetermined objectives.
- Act
- The important step is to implement actions that are necessary to achieve improvements in the processes.
An organization must use Quality Assurance to ensure that the product is designed and developed with correct procedures that help to reduce problems and errors, in the final product.
Common QA Complaints
QA teams often face bitterness in the workplace to deliver the successful release of any software product. QA has been described as a necessary pain of the engineering process, which understandably hurts job satisfaction. No one wants to come to work feeling like their team members dread the feedback which they are there to provide. An indication of the waterfall method is that developers and QA are separate from each other’s workflow. This can be incredibly frustrating for both parties, as simple fixes have to go back and forth many times. It’s especially difficult for QA, however, when their work feels tacked on at the end of the process. Many of their recommendations would easier to implement sooner, but they aren’t given that option. Instead, they feel like an afterthought, which drives dissatisfaction.
Common Developer Problem
In traditional software development lifecycles, development brokes into a sequential series of steps. Creating a software requirements specification always comes before start developing the software, which always comes before testing and deployment. When the engineering team is rushed for time, developers can feel under pressure to deliver results faster so that QA can get started.
Common Developer Vs QA battle
It’s inappropriate how often a waterfall methodology can create resentfulness between developers and the QA team. The role of developers (and the team as a whole) is to create a fantastic product. QA’s role is to provide a perspective an engineer may not have had, ultimately helping create a much stronger product. But when they aren’t working in step together, it can feel like QA is coming after the fact and finding fault with the product. Developers want to interact with QA as little as possible, throwing code over the wall and waiting to hear back about any bug fixes.
QA and Developers Help each other
QA and testing can play a much more important role in your business than finding bugs. Not only should they identify defects after developers have finished their work, but they should also take a proactive role in preventing problems in the first place, like a good doctor. Your testers should take an advisory role, recommending tools and processes in order to help development. In addition, QA and developer should meet at the beginning of every sprint to ensure everyone understands what will build, how it will break up, and how it will be tested. This way they will feel like different parts of the same team, working together to create an amazing product.
Quality Control
The abbreviation of Quality Control is QC. QC in software engineering ensures the quality of a product or a service. Quality control is not a process of creating a product where it maintains the quality of the end product.
Meeting the specifications and the requirements of the client are the ultimate purpose of Quality Control. You need to fix an issue to ensure a good quality product for the client.
Quality Control appraises the quality level skills of the people and provides training and certifications. The organizations require this appreciation and help give flawless service to the customers.
Difference between Quality Control and Quality Assurance:
Important differences between Quality assurance(QA) with quality control (QC). QA provides all-inclusive guidelines. QC is a production-focused process. Inspection is a great example of QC. QA is a process to ensure a product specified requirements where QC focuses on individual inspections or defects.
We can say it this way,
- QA becomes SQA ( Software Quality Assurance)
- QC becomes Software Testing.
Quality Assurance in Software:
Software quality assurance (SQA) methodically finds a model and the functions required to improve development cycles. Finding and fixing coding bugs can carry unintentional outcomes; Sometimes you fix one issue that breaks other features and functionality.
SQA has become an integral part of the development process to avoid errors. It saves development time and expenses. Without SQA processes in place, an update to software can break other features and cause bugs.
Software development methodologies are Waterfall, Agile and Scrum. Each development process seeks to optimize work efficiency.
QA team:
You will find many job opportunities for a quality assurance team, SQA engineers, SQA Analyst, and SQA test automation engineers. SQA engineers observe and test software through development. An SQA Analyst will monitor the implication and practices of SQA over software development cycles. The purpose of an SQA test automation is to create programs to automate the SQA process.
QA vs. testing:
QA focuses more on the processes and procedures where testing focuses on the logistics of using a product to find bugs and defects. Quality Assurance identifies the standards around testing to confirm that a product meets defined business requirements. Testing validates the function of a product and identifying bugs.
Best Practices for Quality Assurance: Learn the Importance of Software Quality Assurance Nowadays.
- Create a strong and stable testing environment.
- It should select the release criteria cautiously.
- Use automation testing tools to risky areas for embracing the whole process.
- Each process should allocate time properly.
- Software usage according to its importance should fix on bugs.
- Dedicated security and performance testing team should be formed.
- Emulate similar customer accounts to a production environment.
There are 5 primary Quality Assurance Functions:
-
- Technology transfer: This function consists of design documents, trial and error data, and the evaluation process which confirms and permits the documents.
- Validation: The validation plan for the whole system is prepared here. It establishes the process and approves the test criteria for validating products. Here it validates resource planning.
- Documentation: Distribution process and archiving documents involved here in this function. A proper change control procedure maintains changes in the documents. In this phase, it approves all types of documents.
- Ensuring Quality of products.
- Quality enhancing plans.
Final word
The key to cooperation between QA and development is the realization that quality assurance is everyone’s main job. Your commitment needs to bake into the software development process from the very beginning to deliver a quality product. Insist every member of the project team performs a quality job to deliver a quality product. The importance of Software Quality Assurance nowadays has taken over the quality project delivery. The way it has become a lucrative career for computer science graduates. Day by day, the popularity of software quality assurance engineers is increasing. This article can help you to guide a proper career path and give you the right path for the SQAE career.