Standard Set of QA Practices for Software Companies to Perform Better
Quality is the most significant aspect of any development project these days. Especially when the market and customers are all looking for impeccable performance, only the brands that manage to meet professional QA benchmarks could manage to sustain.
Luckily, we have software testing in place to align with the software development lifecycle as product owners have goals to feed business while meeting end user’s requirements. However, the need for driving efficiency with the software testing process needs developers, testers, and stakeholders to identify QA methodologies that can make any product a success.
Besides, it is equally necessary that the QA process should be defined properly when the goals are achieving quality goals through QA best practices. Thus, without taking much time, let us quickly jump on understanding the basics of Quality Assurance as we proceed with identifying the Standard Set of QA Best practices that could help a software development company to upgrade their performance.
Learning The QA Fundamentals
The Definition
QA or Quality Assurance in tech involves achieving and maintaining a certain level of quality for a software product especially by taking kin observance on every stage of development and identifying any limitations and opportunities. Quality Assurance practices allow quick tracking of any bugs that might affect the output of the software product to achieve technical specifications, product compliance, and the highest level of security standards. The process enables testers, developers, and stakeholders to ensure that each and every part of the software functions perfectly, either individually or as a whole.
The path to achieving QA benchmarks goes through six stages of QA implementations which involve:
- Analysis of requirements
- Test Planning
- Test Case Design
- Test Environment Setup
- Test Execution
- Test Closure
However, working on each of these stages needs testers to stick with entry-exit criteria that involve the use of some standard test methods, tools, and goals. Also, working on each of the aforementioned stages need the QA team to define test plans, foster test cases, and prepare defect analysis reports. Such documentation allows easy management and compilation of the process sticking to the agile environment of SDLC.
Though QA testing needs a specialized approach, some parts of testing, such as unit testing, are worked by the developers while UI/UX tests are worked by designers. Moreover, the purpose, methodology, automation, and planning are a few factors that might affect the testing types.
Improving QA Process: The Best Practices
Achieving the highest level of maturity with your QA initiatives is not a one-day task. It needs you to explore different approaches to quality assurance and work on strategies that can help yield maximum productivity. Here is the list of QA best practices that every Quality Assurance company needs to follow in order to attain the highest level of success in business when they need to take the best grade products to the market.
Prepare A Test Plan
The first step to attaining success begins with building a successful plan. It might appear like an easy task, it is vital to prepare for the testing by defining the process under test, the resources required, the test timeline, the team, and the ultimate acceptance criteria.
Moreover, the plan should work on defining the responsibilities of the entire QA team so that a good understanding of the entire project can be built.
Define Goals & Objectives
When you need to serve accountability, it begins with marking some predefined goals and objectives. And the idea of defining the goals and objectives is much more critical in the case of quality assurance. More importantly, it is necessary that any predefined objectives must be made to achieve through the highly-refined implementation of the KPIs. Some of these include:
- To define the maximum limit of defects to be taken for considering development optimization.
- To define the percentage of test automation in the project.
- To ensure the highest level of code coverage for tests.
- To strive for 100 percent requirement coverage.
- To check the percentage of serious bugs for setting any redevelopment.
On top of that, the test objectives must be made specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).
Diversified QA Strategy
To have a diversified QA strategy is extremely important when you need to meet the highest quality benchmarks. This means not limiting yourself to any specific testing techniques but keeping yourself open to various forms of testing to identify different bugs and glitches.
Moreover, developers must be made part of the QA strategy to automate unit tests so that code quality must be achieved, fixing any errors that might disturb the original purpose. Also, every build created must run through smoke testing to check the code validity and locate bugs that might affect the QA goals and product-related objectives.
After running through series of smoke tests, the QA team should aim at regression tests to avoid any breaks to the functionality. Besides, teams can run acceptance testing, in the end, to check that the end product should comply with the business requirements.
Run Quality Reviews
When you run quality reviews, it allows you to have a second opinion on software development and the quality assurance process. This might need you to involve all the technical and non-technical stakeholders who can review the software code, the functionality, the performance, and the overall technical assessment. This would allow you to ensure that all the characteristics of the software, such as code structure, dependencies, documentation, speed, response, and any code duplication, can be interpreted.
The approach can even aid in creating the highest quality code with recommendations on anything that can help streamline the QA process for the future. Also, the review should be considered to be a friendly and constructive document that does not encourage any kind of disappointment within teams.
QA Documentation
The next thing that must be targeted with QA best practices is documenting all the bugs and reported errors. Documentation could help testers to quickly overcome any reoccurring issues and ensure that any similar projects in the future could be worked diligently.
Apart from this, high-quality documentation could help the entire QA team to achieve clarity and negate any long descriptions that might make it difficult to fix the most frequently occurring bugs in the code and development lifecycle. The documents should be made descriptive of any details like devices, operating systems, and browsers where issues were indicated.
Foster The Right Team
Even if it sounds like a less technical aspect to cover, building an effective QA process environment is critical. This means encouraging the Quality Assurance best practices could only be worked with the right team in place. The developers, the testers, the technical stakeholders all must be in harmony with each other when it comes to the QA process.
Moreover, the team should be given a chance to bring their retrospectives forward to avoid any kind of conflicts or frustration. This would help cut off any unsolvable issues and make the team feel valued for their inputs. Remember, Quality people make a quality team, and only a quality team could foster the highest level of QA benchmarks.
Consider All The Errors
An error is an error, no matter how small or big. Though it may look easy to refrain from solving any minute errors or bugs that feel insignificant, professional QA services never resist such issues. Especially when a minor issue has all the potential chances of turning into a major quality issue with upgrades and updates made over time.
At times, bugs can turn to be the symptoms of big issues, and resisting them could add to the technical debt on your application or software. Thus, it is always a good idea to get over any errors as early as possible as delaying the fixes often turns to be an expensive and consuming task.
Expand The Learning Curve
The QA industry has shown exponential growth during the past few years as the IT people have realized the importance of QA at every stage of development. However, sustaining any QA company needs a positive knowledge graph as any information that might appear valuable now could be of no use after the next 3 to 7 years.
Thus, QA best practices should have a special place for continuous learning where approach, methodology, technology, and any potential change in the QA environment must be immediately identified and adopted. Moreover, the QA teams can stick with the latest industry trends through blogs and articles from popular industry influencers.
Besides, you can take the best advantage of social media handles like Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, as well as the job portals to learn the change in requirements for the QA employees. Such an approach would not only help the QA professionals in polishing their skills but can help business owners to update their knowledge and resources.
The Crux
The top QA companies are often rated by the level they have achieved through CMMI certification. However, the journey to attain level 5 of the QA process is not a few-days task. It needs years of polishing and maturity to achieve precision, while attaining the top benchmarks of quality requires extensive refinement of the QA best practices.
And if you are looking forward to yielding all the efficiency with your QA initiatives, make sure it begins with the implementation of all the suggested best practices, right from the development of plans to reviews, documentation, error analysis, and anything that is the project and business-critical for your QA company.
