Wednesday, 19 February 2014

Quality Assurance is a Process, Not a Department

In the software industry, the terms testing and quality assurance (QA) are used interchangeably. Many organizations even deploy a team of dedicated testers, and name it QA department. While considering software QA as a separate process, most organizations undervalue its significance as a significant and ongoing process. In nutshell, software quality assurance can be defined as the methods used to ensure quality by monitoring different software engineering processes constantly. However, the methods of QA can vary according to the nature and requirement of the software development approach. Along with adopting ISO 9000 standards, an organization can further ensure quality by adopting CMMI model. But each organization must consider QA as an integral part of the overall software development process, instead of isolating it as a distinct department.

Why Organizations Must Consider Quality Assurance as a Key Process?

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1. Easy to Adopt Agile Processes: A constant increase is noted in the number of organizations adopting Agile methods to iterate software development projects. Along with making it easier to incorporate changed during different stages of development, the methodology further emphasizes on delivering high quality. With companies constantly exploring options to reduce project cost and time to market, it has become essential to ensure quality from the initial stages of the project. So organizations must integrate QA in each development process to avail the many advantages of Agile methods.

2. Address Different Changes: While developing a software application, the company has to address both technical and business quality issues. As the application needs to be developed rapidly within a stipulated timeframe, there are always chances the defects may naturally creep into the software. Similarly, the constant changes in end-user requirements results in several business quality issues. These issues must be addresses during each stage of development to deliver rich user experience. Thus, QA must be integrated into the development processes from the initial stages to handle different quality issues without putting any extra time.

3. Meet Exact Needs of a Business: The enterprise software applications are developed to solve specific business problems efficiently. So there must not be any gap between the end user requirements and the software delivered by development. The software also needs to be evaluated at various stages of development according to the requirements of the client. Further, there are chances that the client will want new features and functionalities to be included in the software during development. So QA must be integrated seamlessly with each development process to ensure that the product is meeting end user requirements exactly.

4. Save Both Time and Resources: Most business software applications, nowadays, need to be integrated with third-party solutions and services to deliver rich user experience. Further, the complex and complicated nature of the applications makes it a daunting task to complete the project on time. The extremely tight deadline also does not allow organizations to take additional time to evaluate the software’s efficiency and performance. When an organization considers QA as a distinct department, the testing professionals evaluate the software once the development is over. So many organizations are adopting test-based software development model to save both time and resources.

5. Facilitates Distributed Development: Within a short span of time, distributed software development has becomes widely popular among companies as a medium to curtail project cost. Many organizations deploy seasoned software developers and QA engineers who work in different regions. When a software program is being developed in a distributed environment, it becomes essential for the organization to integrate quality assurance in each process. When software testing is conducted at the end of development, there are always chances that the developers have to rework. But the gap between the end user requirements and software developed in a distributed environment can be eliminated by adopting QA as an integral part of the overall development process.

As an ongoing process, software quality assurance further makes it easier for enterprises to beat competition. Along with reducing time to market, the process will further make the software application popular by delivering flawless user experience. If you are planning to hire testing software companies, you must evaluate them to see if they are sufficiently agile or not!

We provide QA and testing services. If you would like to hire software testing engineer for your software projects, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.

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