Can you release an application without ensuring that it is actually functional? No? This is the exact purpose that quality assurance testing aims to serve. It is the process of verifying that the software meets predefined standards of excellence and is also free from any form of critical error.
These goals are very important to provide a seamless end-user experience to your customers. New to quality assurance testing? Don’t worry! This is the perfect blog for you. Here, we will understand the role of QA in the modern software development life cycle. During our understanding, we’ll also try to find various best practices, methods, tools, and future trends of this industry.
What is Quality Assurance in Software Development?
Want to learn more about QA? Let us take a step back and begin with its very basics. QA or quality assurance is a definite and systematic process to guarantee the quality of your software. QA is basically implemented throughout the development and deployment lifecycle.
Quality control or QC, aims to find defects, while QA is a more proactive approach that will emphasize the prevention of issues in the first place. QA achieves this goal by refining the processes, tools and methodologies involved with the software development and testing life cycle.
While implementing quality assurance, you need to work with multiple procedures. To shed more light over this segment, let us understand some of the major steps of this process:
- It begins with requirement analysis, where you ensure that every requirement is complete, clear, and testable.
- Then, you have to proceed towards the test planning phase, where you will define the testing strategies, testing scope, resources required, and the timeline for the entire process.
- It is followed by the test design phase, where you will be responsible for creating detailed test cases and test scripts. It is the backbone of the entire testing cycle, as this will be the driving force throughout.
- The test execution phase is finally responsible for running the test cases that you have created in the previous instance. It will also identify and report defects that will be found in the testing scenario.
- The quality assurance process concludes with continuous improvement where you will be refining the QA processes based on feedback and testing outcomes. You also need to reimplement all these steps after every significant update to the application infrastructure.
Importance of QA in Software Development
Let us now divert our attention towards some of the major factors that justify the critical role of QA in the modern app development and deployment cycle:
- Early Defect Detection
Quality assurance activities are deeply integrated within the core functions of the software development life cycle. So, it will help identify and resolve defects before they can turn into serious concerns, crashing the complete application infrastructure. Using this approach, you can reduce the cost of fixing bugs and also improve the development speed.
- Enhancing User Experience
It is a common understanding that by delivering high-quality software, you can ensure an intuitive and smooth user experience. Factors like these will have a decisive role in the user satisfaction and user retention rates, which are very important for holding a positive reputation of your brand in this market.
- Cost Savings
By finding and addressing the defects at the earlier phases of the development cycle, you can help minimize the costs that are attached with post-release maintenance and customer support.
- Compliance and Security
The modern software development industry has to abide by very strict user data security compliances and other regulations. Your app will have a lot of sensitive user information that can cause a lot of problems when exposed in the wrong hands.
QA has the power to make sure that the app complies with all the standards and regulations to avoid risks associated with data breaches or legal non-compliance issues.
- Reputation Management
In the competitive software industry, it is very important to maintain your brand reputation. Using the power of efficient quality assurance, you can deliver bug-free and advanced software, which will improve the brand reputation and also create customer trust.
QA Tools and Technologies
Modern QA testing heavily relies on multiple tools and automations to increase both the efficiency and accuracy. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned the major tools and technologies that can benefit this process:
- Test Management Tools
You can use various test management tools like Jira, TestRail, and Zephyr to improve the test planning process. Most of these tools will also have a vital role in helping you in the test execution and test reporting phases as well.
- Cloud Testing Platforms
QA testing heavily relies on real device testing to ensure that your application behaves properly when it is exposed to various device parameters and usage patterns. However, it is a very expensive process to maintain a physical device lab. You can easily solve this problem by using cloud testing platforms like LambdaTest.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. LambdaTest will also help you to run the test scenario on legacy browser versions like Internet Explorer.
This platform also has a role in the test reporting process as it will generate a comprehensive test report with multiple screenshots and videos to pinpoint the faulty elements and take the required actions.
- Performance Testing Tools
You can use various performance testing tools like Jmeter and LoadRunner to understand the software’s performance under various conditions. For example, you can simulate unusual traffic on your app to verify if it crashes in these parameters.
- Security Testing Tools
What happens if anyone can access your customer data? The worst fear will come true! Use security testing tools like OWASP ZAP or Burp Suite to identify security vulnerabilities throughout the application. These tools will also help you to ensure robust security measures are implemented when dealing with sensitive customer information.
- Continuous Integration Tools
Finally, the testers can use continuous integration tools like Jenkins and GitLab CI. The proper implementation of these tools will help you to integrate the automated testing capabilities with continuous integration and continuous deployment tablets. These steps will also help you to implement the development and testing process at the same time.
Best Practices for QA
Let us not divert our attention towards some of the best practices related to quality assurance that can improve the quality and productivity of the entire testing cycle:
- It is very important for the testers to implement early QA testing. Ideally, we would recommend initiating QA from the project initiation phase to ensure comprehensive coverage and defect detection. It also allows finding critical errors before they can turn into severe issues.
- It is a great practice to maintain the perfect balance between automation testing and manual testing to ensure that you not only cover the repetitive test cases but also the functional and exploratory test scenarios.
- Throughout the testing phase, the testers must maintain a detailed and up-to-date list of test cases, plans, and scripts. These resources will be crucial for implementing consistency and reproducibility throughout the process. This documentation will also help to bridge the gap between the technical and non-technical members of the team.
- We recommend the QA teams to stay updated with all the emerging technologies, tools, and testing methodologies in this segment. This will allow you to always stay on par with the market requirements and ensure that you are providing the best experience to your customers.
- Finally, you must implement user-centric testing by prioritizing the end user needs and scenarios. This approach will help you enhance the overall user experience of your application.
Challenges in QA
Although quality assurance is a very important part of the modern software development process, it also comes with various challenges that the testers must be aware of. To help the new QA testers, we have mentioned some of the major ones below:
- Modern apps are becoming increasingly complex to incorporate various usage parameters. So, to ensure proper QA testing on these apps, the testers will have to use sophisticated QA strategies and tools.
- The software development industry is starting to work at a very fast pace. This means that the QA testers are faced with tight development deadlines, which can limit their comprehensive testing practices while increasing the risk of defects. So, it will become increasingly important to manage the time frames for the testers.
- The increase in dynamic and evolving testing requirements will require adaptive QA processes to be implemented throughout the development cycle.
- Finally, ensuring the compatibility of modern applications on legacy systems will introduce various unforeseen challenges. These challenges will mainly appear in the form of compatibility issues.
The Future of QA
The world of quality assurance testing will continue to change to add new technologies and advancements. Let us go through some of the major new additions that you can expect in QA in the coming years:
- AI testing tools will start influencing quality assurance as they will have the ability to predict defects or optimize test cases and also analyze large data sets for improved accuracy throughout the software testing cycle.
- Testers will also begin adopting shift-left testing as it is a production environment which will allow the QA teams to gather real-time feedback and enhance the quality of the software that is being developed.
- The integration of DevOps technologies will further highlight the importance of continuous testing to ensure seamless delivery throughout the application development phase.
- Virtual environments and cloud-based testing platforms like LambdaTest will play a pivotal role in helping the developers to enable scalable and flexible testing practices.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the factors that we have put forward in this article, we can safely say that quality assurance is an inseparable part of providing high-quality software to your end users. This is because modern software not only has to meet user expectations but also the business goals of your organization.
So, by integrating quality assurance throughout the software development life cycle, you can use modern tools and adopt best practices to minimize defects, improve user experience, and also drive the innovation throughout the development cycle.
Finally, with the continuous advancement of modern technology, QA will also continue to evolve and will improve its role in shaping the future of software development. Therefore it is highly important for the testers to keep themselves updated with all the new innovations and trends in this segment.
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