QA managers have been researching to identify the root causes of software failures. One of the main reasons for such failures were caused due to poor quality assurance during the software development lifecycle. The main purpose of QA is to prevent releasing poor quality software apps. Small mistakes in the process can lead to huge financial losses. When QA teams identify the issues after release and resolve them, the bad reputation and negative rating of the apps prevented their success. So QA managers are striving to implement effective QA management that includes QA testing tools and methodologies for creating bug-free apps. Software quality management involves focusing on three major aspects QA, quality control, and software testing.
Let’s have a look at these three concepts before moving forward:
Quality Assurance (QA):
QA is a process that includes a set of organizations’ actions aimed to improve software quality. Its purpose is to improve the software development process and make it more effective by introducing standards of quality to prevent issues and bugs in the software applications. Thus a QA team involves best industry practices that ensure teams are steering in the right direction.
Quality Control (QC):
Quality control is a quality management principle that includes a set of activities that focus on meeting the quality requirements. QC includes all product-oriented processes that ensure software product quality before releasing them. Software QA teams typically govern all the software quality control activities.
Software Testing:
Software testing is a process that aims at identifying and resolving technical issues and bugs in a software code and assesses the overall product performance, usability, compatibility, and security. Software testing is not just the main part of QA but holds great importance in the software development process.
Ever since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, QA teams are required to work remotely. This has been a challenge for many teams and businesses for the past year. However, executives and managers have explored different ways to keep their teams motivated to maintain their focus on quality assurance. It has been a tough time for employees who have not been in the habit of remote working. Organizations have set up different testing environments, QA testing tools, etc. to support their employees while working from the comfort of their homes. Change is the only constant thing in the world and organizations have been adopting different techniques to overcome the challenges faced during the lockdown situations, where social distancing has been implemented by the law enforcement companies.
We have listed a few best practices that organizations look for in software development companies to increase the quality of their software products while keeping improving their teams’ efficiency:
Planning the Testing and QA Processes
QA managers have designed test processes with properly planned, predefined, and documented testing activities. Good documentation is also a proven key to build effective communication between the software teams.
- Test Policy – A document that lists down an organizations’ testing objectives, quality standards for testing procedures, QA testing tools to support the testing process, quality metrics to assess the effectiveness of testing, and ways to improve their testing efforts.
- Test Strategy – A roadmap to achieve the test objectives, budget limitations, communication, and status reporting, defect reporting and tracking, test execution schedule, deadlines, and risk management.
- Test Plan – A good test plan should include the schedule of all testing activities to control your QA team’s testing time. It should define the roles of every team member clearly. There are no hard and fast rules to create a test plan because it depends on the processes, standards, and test management tools that a company is using.
Leverage Test-Oriented Software Development Management
Another way to improve software quality is to implement test-oriented management approaches. This can be done by using extreme programming (XP) which is a software development process that aims to develop high-quality software with the ability to adapt to changing user requirements. And another approach to do so is by implementing a test-driven development (TDD) approach.
Implementing a Shift-Left Approach
A shift-left testing approach follows an approach that performing testing activities should begin from the very beginning of the development process instead of making it a final step as a traditional waterfall approach suggests.
Conclusion
If you want to improve your QA team’s efficiency, then you need to invest in the right testing tools and implement processes that are free from issues. Improving the quality of software products can have a huge impact on your business and its financial position.
