Demystifying Quality Assurance
A quick walkthrough of Quality Assurance and how it is different from Testing.
Whether it is the development of new products or integrating new features, continuous delivery and software release cycles are the prime obligations. Companies have to cope with adapting, modifying, improving and delivering faster to have a competitive edge while meeting changing customer requirements. Thus, Quality Assurance (QA) has a say over these scenarios.
Understanding Quality Assurance
Let’s begin with the question: What is quality assurance?
In developing digital products or services, quality assurance is an important and strategic process throughout the development phase. It is a systematic set of activities designed to ensure whether the software product or service being developed meets specific requirements and defined processes. These processes are used for deliverables to manage and prevent defects. It certainly improves work processes involved thereby increasing efficiency. QA has three prime objectives latched onto its cloak — Reliability, Efficiency, and Adaptiveness.
A major angle of QA is to ensure that the development team is on the same page right from the kickoff. A slight deviation and the angle diverges. The development team must have an understanding of the requirements and needs of the end users because that is the penultimate objective of quality assurance. The quality of a software product or system has a relative and huge impact on customer experience. As a rule of thumb, QA and Testing teams lead this front.
Voila! The difference — QA vs Testing
“What is the difference between QA and Testing? Does it matter?”
To be very clear, I must say that ‘Testing is a subset of quality assurance’. Testing is an intrinsic part of the QA process.
Importance of Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance in software development has seen a continuous demand surge in recent years and it doesn’t seem to taper off because it helps businesses scale up in four different ways.
Customer retention
The first impression is the last impression — you have only a single chance to stand out and build trust for your customers. However, you might have several chances to do that, but probably that might cost an arm and a leg.
When users download your app and find glitches or bugs, they are most likely never going to use the app ever again. Even if you fix those glitches, they have a negative orientation with your app. Therefore, the QA team performs a very momentous role to analyse and prevent such situations from surfacing.
Cost-efficiency
Quality Assurance professionals may prove to be money spinners. As mentioned earlier, they work towards preventing defects right from the kickoff of a project. Analyzing and fixing issues from the very start of the development cycle is obviously a cheaper solution than fixing the issues after the release. This, in turn, ensures a clean product before the customer meets the product.
Meeting clients’ needs
Quality assurance activities make sure that the teams are meeting the needs and requirements of the company and of course the clients. The clients expect exactly what they pay for. It is the sheer work of the QA team that ensures the client’s requirements, demands and expectations are never compromised upon.
Positive image for the company’s credibility
QA team works towards inducing positive status for developing quality products or applications. They ensure that the developed products comply with the client’s needs and expectations. Generally, clients aim to invest more in a company for high quality, reliable and safe products which is a sign of the trust build-up between the two entities. Therefore, it is QA that ensures continuous boost-up of a company’s credibility.
Balance between speed & quality for the continuous delivery chain
With a strong foundation in continuous integration and testing, the QA team balances the quality with speed and predictability of the process. QA aligns the test teams to keep pace with development teams by assuring the quality, reliability and safety of the product, thereby elevating the customer experience.
QA is behind the continuous delivery pipeline and affirms in balancing the client’s needs with the need for continuous release of quality products quickly and strategically.
“90% of the functionality delivered now is better than 100% delivered never.” Brian Kernighan
“What if there is no QA?”
This question creates a hypothetical view of whether a software company can scale up without QA. Probably not.
The QA team is responsible for preventing bad software from being seen by the customer. This redirects to the fact that a QA professional needs to find every possible case to break software, and then prepare a report of wherever the software testing process fails for fixes.
The absence of QA team throws-in feeble workflows and broken methods. This, in turn, incapacitates any chance of preventing defects in the product being developed. Their absence poses a threat that when the delivered product continues to mature, as it may curtail the chances of efficient inspections and adaptations needed of said product. Thus any software company needs to have a competent QA team for scalability and growth.
Curiosity is the key
‘Curiosity’ is an attribute that if developed comes as a sophisticated experience which in my opinion is a go-getter attribute for any professional. One might be actively curious about their tasks, as long as they have an undecaying interest in doing those tasks right. ‘Curiosity’ might help a QA professional to amplify their ability in their multi-faceted functions such as cross-functionality, multi-tasking and QA methodologies thereby excel in the complexity of the job.
