Guide To Quality Assurance – SQA – Part 1

The concept of quality assurance in the digital world is born from the need for quality products for the end-user. That is to say, Software QA serves as the latest filter for the software development process that controls quality measures for your product or service. 

Don’t Mix Up Software Quality Assurance and Engineering Quality Assurance

Engineering Quality Assurance is all about maintaining a desired level of quality in a service or product that is part of the quality management department. In contrast, a Software Quality Assurance engineer is measured by their ability to break down a digital system and reassemble it to improve it. 

“Testing is about defect detection. Quality Assurance is about defect prevention.” – Amir Ghahrai.

SQA stands for Software Quality Assurance, which has many different definitions and consists of processes and methods used to ensure quality software engineering is maintained.

Now imagine that your new website design is ready. The content is great and the interface is working. However, it lacks mobile responsiveness, users can’t log in to the site, links lead to dead pages, and clients need to spend more than 10 minutes in the checkout/purchase process. 

Does this sound familiar? These are some of the most common issues in software development. This can happen for a variety of reasons and more importantly, you need to correct them before you launch your software solution.

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Besides Correcting Defects, There Are 4 Important Reasons to Do SQA

1. Remember that Your Clients Are Trusting in Your Software Development

No matter what business model you follow, quality must be a priority for any software development company. Thus, offering value is not a fickle task and it’s something that you need to prioritize.  SQA will help your clients make use of your software with ease, giving them a reason to keep using it and expanding your product reach. 

2. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

You can be as proud as you want about how your software is working, but remember when your product has hidden issues, a decrease in sales will be the first sign to notice it. Prepare for this and find a QA engineer that can help your software work seamlessly in your users’ favor. 

3. It’s Not All about the Bad: Look at the Product through the Customer’s Eyes

There is more to QA than just bugs. We create software to solve a need and develop it from an engineering standpoint. We tend to focus on great structure and clean programming. Consequently, the often forget about customer behavior, the tiny things our users need to do things they want faster. It’s not easy to get the fine details right the first time. This is the point where an experienced team of QA engineers will break down your system and correct the presented problems. 

4. Nobody Is Perfect

There is no perfect code, no matter what language you use to create your software, no matter how great it looks. Ask an SQA engineer to look into utilizing his/her testing methods and see how many issues pop up. Focus on the user side and you might be surprised at the number of issues that are being addressed.

Then, How Is Quality Assurance Done?

You can do QA by using systematic tests that expose errors. Let’s take a look at some of them: 

Test-based on Functionality

• Functional Testing: It’s a type of black-box testing that tests a slice of functionality from the whole system. Then, the basic process consists of feeding inputs and examining the outputs. By its nature, it does not take into consideration the internal structure of the whole system.

   

• Regression Testing: Inform your SQA engineers of the performance of a previously tested software after a made change or an interface with another software.  These include changes like patches, enhancements, or various configurations.

   

Test-based on Execution

• Automation Test:  Test cases require the assistance of tools, scripts, and software.

   

• Manual Testing: In manual testing (as the name suggests), test cases are executed manually. That is to say, a resource do this assignment without any support from tools or scripts.

   

Deliver Value to Your Customer

In the end, many software development projects don’t need to undergo a structured and systematic SQA process. To give value to the end-user, whether it’s an inbound or outbound endeavor, you need to take into consideration that something might be wrong with your project, take the time to test it,  and great things will surely come. 

Conclusion

Software testing needs to be a well-thought process with a structured set of quality requirements from your stakeholders. Therefore, your quality assurance resources need to be ready for the constant evolution of the software development industry. This means applying changes in best practices, frameworks, and languages alike.