How to improve Your QA (Quality Assurance) Maturity Score?
“Quality is the best business plan. Period.”
By John Lasseter
It is well understood how quality plays a significant role in establishing the foundation of any business. When you think like a customer, you shall never compromise on quality, and that is what you will go through in this blog about how to optimize and take your business to new heights of success.
An introduction to QA maturity:
Quality Assurance, aka QA, is a process designed explicitly in software development to deliver the best-in-class software. When any software is in the development stage, every organization has its own goals to achieve, but that is only possible when the product matches the quality standards. Hence, QA is performed!
Performing just quality assurance is not enough to ensure quality delivery but certifying that your QA is mature and performs all the necessary steps is also important. To understand your QA maturity, find answers below to some questions that might help you learn more about the concept:
Why is QA maturity important?
A QA process is mature when it follows all the steps to deliver a quality product and achieve your clients’ needs. When working on a project, a quality engineering team can face significant challenges. A mature QA process helps find the solutions and a plan of action that could help overcome such problems. By this, you must understand that the QA process is crucial but optimizing its maturity increases its efficacy!
Your QA maturity helps you achieve higher goals and deliver what’s best for your client with no compromises made. It is integrated with the development process since the beginning. Every company providing QA services should strive to achieve the best results and consider a QA maturity model best suited for their project.
What are the models that support the QA maturity process?
Two models are considered as the globally recognized models of QA maturity, and these are TMMi and TPI.
· The TMMi model or Test Maturity Model Integration is the one that helps software testers in increasing test efficiency by meeting all requirements of lower levels to move to a higher one. This model makes the assists in the process improvement of your QA. The TMMi model is best suited for larger organizations as it requires huge investments and human resources.
· The TPI model analyzes the misses and tells what should be in place to reach to the next level. It is also suitable for all sizes of organizations as it provides a smooth flow with a checklist to follow that helps the quality engineering team identify the level of QA maturity and evaluate the improvement plan.
How to improve your QA maturity process?
What if you follow the QA maturity model but are yet not satisfied with your QA achievements? Then here are some ways that could help you not get lost. Consider these as options to experience higher QA maturity. Learn about the following six ways to take your QA maturity to the next level:
1. Enhance your QA process knowledge:
A software development process involves different individuals from distinct positions who require enough knowledge about QA and its specifications. So, when a project manager lacks ability on QA and is supposed to assess and analyze some aspect of the project, and then make decisions like time of delivery, budget for the project or the need of resources like workforce, he/she can go wrong. It could directly result in low quality software, with many missed bugs or unresolved issues. Hence, it is vital to gain or enhance your knowledge on the QA process before making any crucial decisions that could hamper the customer’s requirements and delivery quality.
2. Consider chalking out a QA plan:
When working on software development, planning is everything. Your one-time planning could save you and the software testing team hours of effort in redoing the work! Understand the project requirements and plan every detail of the process strategically from, time to budget to resource allocation. In contrast, you are making sure that your QA specialists’ team should understand the project requirements clearly.
3. Opting Test Automation to improve your QA maturity health:
To deliver the product on time and with higher quality, it is suggested that the QA testers opt for test automation practices in software development. Automating the software tests can help you to prioritize the cases that need your direct attention while simultaneously testing the others automatically. It will also help to reduce the testing time and solve bugs in no time. Therefore, opting for test automation can be one of your ways to improve the QA maturity.
4. Consider taking a QA maturity assessment:
To analyze your QA maturity process level, it is imperative to take a QA maturity assessment that will help you understand the gaps in your QA process and identify the requirements that you might have missed to fulfill to reach a higher level of QA maturity. Taking a QA maturity assessment will help you understand the glitches and assist the software testing team in designing the plan of action to climb up the QA ladder.
5. Seek assistance from an expert:
Consulting a QA expert will help your project by analyzing and assessing the existing condition of your QA process. A QA expert will help you by:
· Exploring the on-going status of the QA maturity.
· Suggesting the improvement plan to achieve the goals.
· Assisting in the execution of the action plan advised.
· Suggesting how to further enhance the QA process and maintain the standards.
You can seek help from QA experts at any level of your process, as it does not hamper your development cycle. Outsourcing your quality engineering services could also help if you lack trained resources and are worried about the quality of work.
6. Evaluate your QA maturity success:
Once you are on the road to enhancement, there is no harm in evaluating your QA maturity success. After using the suggested measures to increase the QA maturity, it becomes crucial to know the results of these changes as it will help you to steer in the right direction, saving your time and resources.
Key takeaways:
Quality Assurance is essential for any software development cycle and attempting it efficiently should be a part of the plan. There are considerable investments in different firms involved in the development of any software. Therefore, delivering it as per the set visions and with the best quality is a key to achieving customer satisfaction. So, by assessing and improving your QA maturity score, you can be assured, that your QA game is top notch and every software you produce will be close to flawless by the time it is deployed!
