The Future of Quality Assurance

The IT world is growing from day to day, and specialists are aware that it is just going to become enormously bigger in a couple of years. Even the COVID-19 will not be able to stop the IT world’s growth due to a high need for quality IT services. The most promising areas of IT that are trended today are automation, AI, cloud solutions, human augmentation and practical blockchain.

The internal IT processes are developing as well. Development and team management methodologies, backend/frontend parts, and QA have long been the most important and demanded components in IT and they still are. Today we will focus on QA.

Long-Term Quality Prospective

QA has long gone far from being just about bug seeking. Users rely on having the best service turning to any company, and one of the most important QA tasks nowadays is their satisfaction while achieving business outcomes. Here are three QA incoming trends that are aimed on making the business work better than ever.

Artificial Intelligence

According to the World Quality Report (WQR) 2018–19, the growth of Artificial Intelligence has a big impact on QA activities and will continue to grow in the upcoming years. AI lets IT companies reach the highest level of testing that have ever been reached, converting QA activities to fully self-generating, self-running and self-adapting processes. However, there are practices in QA that can be tested and implemented only by highly qualified specialists, concerning customisation and creation of complex tests.

From SimbirSoft practice: In practice that means that QA specialists are becoming able to apply smart analytics to the most important decisions in the testing process, like test data generation, test execution priorities or task assignment optimisation, and test reports generation. Moreover, AI is going to influence the most critical path of product validation, the execution phase, even more and more.

Considering the business needs, AI involvement makes the development process of complex integrated IT systems be faster, reducing time-to-market in the most dependent industries like fintech, foodtech, retail and healthcare.

Customer Experience

Users always want to know that the quality of your product is high and it’s not going to become lower in future. The role of QA in customer experience is to make them sure of it.

From SimbirSoft practice: there are several concepts that help us to focus on customer experience in QA:

• Communicate. As it was mentioned, we use Agile methodology to make the best results and this development approach implies that QA engineers communicate not only with developers, but also with the product team, business team, stakeholders, and users.
• Collaborate. Considering quality of an IT product as the main goal, the role of a QA specialist transforms into a full-cycle professional who cooperates with all team members at all stages of development, being responsible for quality and testing activities throughout the process. That approach allows the team to make most efficient decisions, meeting the customer needs.
• Be thorough and responsible. For QA it’s important to spend time upfront to understand what end users want and need, gather collaborative team effort, and stay focused on ensuring a high-quality product with a delightful customer experience.

Agile Methodology

Agile Software Development is the perfect answer on the market request. The demand to deliver software faster and to be more responsive to the changes is constantly increasing, and that makes IT companies reconsider their management, development and QA processes.

From SimbirSoft practice: we use Agile at SimbirSoft as one of our main management instruments. Not so long ago we have reconsidered our QA department as a dedicated department of the company. On the projects our QA engineers function as the parts of the development teams rather than separate testing units. Сreating a team for a project, we involve a QA specialist to the full circle of development, and even to communications with the client, if needed. That transforms testing process into an ongoing process, reducing time for the project release and time-to-market as a result.

Changing the Usual QA Approach

Being a modern IT service provider means that you need to move with the times. Combining all above mentioned today trends and methods and focusing on the needs of the market, we have decided not only to create a separated multifunctional QA department, but also to expand the pool of our QA services.

Our QA department consists of more than 120 QA and 50 SDET certified engineers who are able to hold all types of functional, non-functional and automated testing within backend, frontend, DB, desktop, mobile, and design parts.

Considering an example of how QA services have to be developed to adapt today business requirements, we provide a range of following QA opportunities:

• Strengthening the team

This method is suitable for businesses that need to strengthen their QA team by additional specialists. Invited experts work together with full-time experts (inhouse or another outsourcing team) and adjust to the development and testing processes. With the help of an experienced outsourcer, the business builds the process of working together as a team perfectly. The need for outsourcing can be either temporary (for example, before the product release), or permanent — if the client does not have enough QA specialists of the necessary level.

• Dedicated QA center

This option is suitable for companies that do not have their own QA specialists at all. We usually add testing and quality assurance team, starting of three people, led by a QA lead. These are the “brains” and “hands” that can not only provide the quality of the product, but also analyse, improve, and set the company’s development processes or build them from scratch. Another one important advantage of dedicated QA team involvement is the ability to carry out the unbiased testing. That practice allows different teams implement testing being independent from each other, remaining their views clear.

• Audit of applications or processes

Application audit is an independent assessment of the product’s status, which may sometimes be necessary, for example, before the release of the product or before changing the outsource developer. Specialists check the product for compliance with the requirements (specific or standart), evaluate it, and make a report describing and prioritising bugs and suggestions for improvement.

The company may need to audit processes if the current team can not achieve the desired result, there are problems in the development workflow or bugs at the production stage.

From SimbirSoft practice: our partner, a leading real estate online portal, contacted us to strengthen the inhouse backend, frontend and QA teams. We had an important task: to check the functionality of the financial services calculator and its interaction with other services. We’ve tested key logic chains, user behavior scenarios, personal offer calculations, and a service for filling out documents in a short period of time. As a result, we helped our partner to identify and fix errors and bugs, as well as provide users with a high-quality and convenient service for filling out mortgage documents.

• QA consulting

With the help of an outsourcing QA team the expertise within the client’s company can be significantly increased. Experts join the inhouse team, analyse their ways of working with the product and determine the sides that can be improved. They help setting up the processes, train and control the client’s team.

In Conclusion

Today IT is becoming more multilateral and customer oriented. To be succeed in business you have to respect the new rules of the market and be flexible. We have created a wide range of QA services that could be implemented within any type of business. Contact us to get more information about our IT possibilities.

SimbirSoft is a modern IT-company, specialising in the implementation of end-to-end software & mobile development projects. Within 19 years, we have developed more than 620 IT solutions: enterprise automation systems, highly loaded systems, mobile applications, Machine Learning & Data Science solutions, embedded software. Today we collaborate with many international companies such as ABBYY, Burger King Russia, and Rosbank. Our full portfolio is here.

Learn more about QA from our pecial article: Variations and Purpose of Test Design Technique

Not sure about the difference between QA and tester job? We got an answer: QA vs QC vs Testing: What is the Difference

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