An Article by Ireti Ogendengbe -QA Engineer at Enyata Nigeria
The phrase “quality assurance” is used across all processes that result in the delivery of a final product, not just in the development of software.
Prior to being made available to the customer, a system must first go through quality assurance (QA) in order to fulfil a need and operate as intended. It is always a great practice to confirm that the product, system, or service complies with the necessary standards. Making sure the performance, design, reliability, and maintainability expectations of the product are met as part of the process.
In this article, the focus will be on quality assurance in software development.
QA in software application development involves testing a software product to ensure it aligns with the design guidelines and meets the functional product requirements.
In the software development process, a requirement document specifies how the software is expected to work. Professionals specializing in software testing are called quality assurance engineers or quality assurance testers.
Software testing can either be done manually or automatically. Manual software testing involves human intervention in going through the features of the application to verify its correctness, while automated software testing involves minimal human effort. Usually, automated testing is done by running a code script. An automated QA tester needs to be skilled in a programming language and be able to automate the test process.
Most teams use an agile technique in software development, where the development process is broken down into sprints.
A sprint is a time-framed unit of the entire development process during which the development team works on completing a specific product feature, which might either be a new feature or an improvement on an existing feature.
QA testing is a vital part of every sprint to ascertain that any new addition to the application does not break existing features and that the added feature works well. Unlike the waterfall development approach, where the testing phase begins after the software application has been built.
In the software quality assurance process, the QA tester performs manual or automated tests on the software application, reports all bugs discovered, and retests when the issue has been fixed by the engineering team before closing the issue. There are tools used in software bug management, such as Jira, Trello, and Microsoft Azure, to mention a few. These tools are used to report and track software development defects.
5 Most Essential Benefits of Testing Software Applications
Customer Satisfaction: A major goal of every business is to achieve customer satisfaction. Remember the saying, “Customer is king?” A well-tested software product meets the customer’s requirements without any defects surfacing. Software testing ensures that the product’s customer requirements are met before delivery. Without adequate software testing, there is no way a business can be confident in its product delivery and whether or not it meets customer satisfaction. Testing a software application gives confidence in the final products released to the market.
Enhances Productivity: Detecting and resolving defects in the application in time enhances team productivity. Testing helps to save the time that can be incurred in the future to solve the defect. Since testing works simultaneously with development, QA testers communicate with engineers during the development process to fix detected bugs and defects. As a result of this simple process, application development can be faster and more time-efficient in the long run.
Quality Product: Software testing helps deploy only a quality product that improves customer satisfaction. With thorough and successful QA testing, software products can meet all the requirements. Similarly, a product that is well-tested before deployment yields a low failure rate and great feedback from the end users.
Bug-Free Deliverable: QA testing ensures that applications being introduced to the market are bug-free. An application being bug-free means there are no glitches, faults, or defects that prevent the application from working effectively. Though a 100% bug-free application might be practically impossible, the QA team must identify all bugs in an application and get the engineer to fix them before deploying the application to production.
Reliable Product: Since software testing ensures that applications are bug-free, products that are well-tested before deployment or launch to the market always have a higher success rate than untested products. Hence, tested applications are more reliable for users because they perform all functionalities without defects.
Conclusion
As accurately pointed out above, software testing helps to evaluate and verify the effective performance of applications as per all the necessary user requirements. Whether the testing team adopts a manual or automated testing model, testing a software application comes with many benefits that increase application performance and user satisfaction.
If you need more insight into QA, you can listen to the podcast episode we had with a QA expert, where she caters to the following question: Where exactly does QA fit into the development process? What is QA in simple terms? In the absence of a QA engineer, who carries out the QA/QC requirements? Get answers to this question and lots more by clicking here.
