What is Quality Assurance ? : A Definitive Guide | Everything You Need to Know [ OverView ]

• In this article you will get
• 1.Introduction to Quality Assurance
• 2.What does QA mean in software testing?
• 3.Importance of Quality Assurance
• 4.QA process: What does it involve?
• 5.QA methods
• 6.What are the Quality Assurance Standards?
• 7.Advantages and Disadvantages
• 8.Conclusion

Introduction to the Quality Assurance (QA)

Managing a quality of a product or a service involves planning, fulfilling, and monitoring activities. Quality assurance comes under monitoring facet of that discipline. It’s process or act of confirming whether a firm’s quality requirements met or not. An alternate definition is it’s a part of a quality management, which focuses on a fulfilling the quality requirements. Quality assurance is the twofold process that supports a management internally and customers’ confidence and also company credibility externally.

QA strives to deliver the consistent results through a set of standardized processes and procedures that systematically monitors various aspects of a product or a service. By a regular audits and other forms of assessments, QA detects and fixes a problems or variances that fall outside of an organized standards or requirements.The concept of a quality assurance was first started in manufacturing domain and later spread to most of industries, including software development.

What is a QA in software testing?

Quality Assurance (QA) in a software testing is explained as a procedure to ensure quality of a product or service meeting a specifications set by the organization. QA enhances a software development process and makes it efficient and effective as per quality standards are defined for a software products. Quality Assurance is also called the Quality Assurance Testing.

Importance of Quality Assurance

The quality of a product is the only thing that matters in a today’s software world. It helps companies to create the products and services that fulfill a customer’s expectations. Also, it yields a high-quality product offerings that build trust and loyalty with the customers. Implementing a some standard software quality assurance practices will take a Quality Assurance a long way:

• Make a quality assurance an inherent part of a technical team.
• Create the robust testing environment.
• A Predefined quality standards.
• Select a release criteria carefully.
• A Measure quality metrics.
• Create the performance testing and dedicated security team.
• Allocate the appropriate time for every process.
• Prioritize a bug fixes based on a software usage.
• Leverage the automation tools whenever needed.
• Maintain a continuous communication, collaboration, and optimization across all the departments.

QA process: What does it involve?

• Developing quality assurance plan.
• Audit project quality.
• Analyse.
• A Review project.

Quality Assurance (QA) Methods

There are some types of a quality assurance testing, all of which are important for the ensuring the product is bug-free. Below, listed the primary QA testing methodologies to give a complete understanding of testing process and how it improves a software, app, or product.There are two types of a testing in QA, one is functional, and other is non-functional testing. The goal of an utilizing this testing methodology is to manage the software successfully in multiple environments and across various platforms.

Functional Testing:

In this testing, test application against a specific business requirements. It involves the several test types that configured in a way that software behaves as a expected to utilise a test cases provided by design team. The testing methods are be conducted in order and include:

• Unit testing
• Integration testing
• System testing
• Acceptance testing

1.Unit Testing:The first level of a testing is unit testing, which developers by a themselves perform. It ensures the individual components of a piece of software at the code level are the functional and work as they are intended to be. Developers in the test-driven environment will typically write and run the tests before a software or feature passed over to a test team.

2.Integration Testing:This part of a testing process involves an integrating various units and thoroughly testing them. Unlike a unit testing, which focuses on an individual unit, integration testing is all about checking how units work together to complete functions. Like a unit testing, integration testing can be a slow, repetitive process. QA teams often an automate a parts of the integration testing to improve the efficiency and save time.

3.System testing:System testing evaluates an integrated systems to ensure whether it meets a specific requirements. This test discovers the previously unnoticed bugs, stability problems , and significant problems.

4.Acceptance testing:This testing process is a last phase of functional testing and ensures a project or product necessities satisfied.

Non-functional Testing:

Non-functional tests are include tests that focus on operational aspects of a software. This include:

• Vulnerable/security testing
• Compatibility testing
• Usability testing
• Performance testing

1.Vulnerable/security testing:Tests an application or a website to find vulnerabilities or security holes utilized by hackers. This testing phase aims to ensure there are security risks that could can compromise the user’s data or the other sensitive information.

2.Compatibility testing:This testing verifies a application’s compatibility with a hardware and software it will be running on, from an internet browsers to hardware, operating systems, complementary plugins, and the several other factors tested during this phase. It tells how application will work in multiple environments.

3.Usability testing:Usability a testing tests application ease of a use from an end-user perspective. It’s performed during a system testing stages.

4.Performance testing:Tests a application performance under different onditions, including stability and responsiveness. The objective of this testing is to ensure app performs as it should be.Now that can understand what are the QA methodologies. Let’s know what quality control is and how it varies from quality assurance.

What are the Quality Assurance Standards?

Quality assurance (QA) standards are a set of measures implemented by a businesses worldwide to confer commitment to delivering quality products or services to customers. Mainly, QA standards are about meeting the customer requirements that exceed their expectations.Companies will document how to meet requirements and specifications of client or customer in a systematic, reliable fashion to meet a QA standards.Standards provide with a shared vision, understanding, and vocabulary needed to meet an expectations of the stakeholders.

Advantages and Disadvantages of quality assurance

Advantages of Quality Assurance:

• QA saves money – It leads to a cost reductions stemming from a prevention of product defects.
• Prevents from unforeseen emergencies – With a corporate software, the stakes are even higher, and the bugs can lead to the system blackouts, missing data, and communication breakdowns. With QA, there is a no margin for errors.
• Promotes the Organization’s productivity and efficiency – While development and testing is performed in parallel can fix defects in an early stages.
• Boosts customer satisfaction – Regular client involvement in a software development and testing increases customer satisfaction that software quality developed as requirements.
• Improves Client Confidence – Proper quality checks at a various levels of software like a review, inspection, and more with involvement of both the internal and external stakeholders will increase a client’s confidence in the submission of weekly reports of defect. Requirement metrics also help in an assuring a client’s work gets done on time.

Disadvantages of Quality Assurance:

Time-consuming : Executing every action in QA will be time-consuming and leads to a wastage of time in documentation and meetings rather than working on the actual software development and testing sometimes.

High cost : Through QA, though a cost of fixing bugs in later stages of the software will be reduced, for a small projects with the low budget, it’s complex to quality assurance as the number of resources increases in a project so does the cost of project. For small projects, hiring a whole team of QA and implementing SQA causes the drastic increase in a price of a project.

Challenging to implement sometimes : As a quality assurance explains all the activities and actions that should be taken at every step of software development in a more detailed manner, sometimes it becomes complex to implement every single process in development.

Conclusion

A Businesses adopting quality assurance can enjoy the many advantages and become a more competitive in a market. ISO certification is the most superior QA standard and recommended to the adopt for any business in any industry. In a future, the market size for the quality assurance is expected to grow even more across companies, and this creates the massive demand for QA professionals.