The Value of Quality Assurance in Software Development

The Importance of QA in Software Development

The Quality Assurance (QA) department is responsible for reducing the probability of bugs occurring during development through carefully thought out processes, as well as identifying any errors that do come up during the build and working with the wider team to assist fixing them. It is essential for creating superior products that are free from bugs. Some businesses are sometimes still unsure about the need for quality assurance because of its cost, but the fact is it actually saves money in the long run. Paying to prevent problems is cheaper than paying to fix them. Not to mention, quality assurance boosts customer confidence.

Quality Assurance Leads to More Long-term Profit

Quality assurance can boost profit in a few ways. Quality assurance saves more money to meet customer’s expectations without having to waste more time or materials. It also makes a business more competitive in the marketplace. Another value of having quality assurance is that businesses are also able to raise the cost of their products because customers are willing to pay more for better quality. Loyal stakeholders will hype up a business, which translates into more sales and long-term profit.

The quality assurance process is all about consistently maintaining high standards. Many of those standards depend on what customers ask for. As customers engage with a product or service, they will have suggestions on how to improve them. Businesses committed to quality will listen and use those suggestions to perfect and upgrade their offering. This keeps customers happy and loyal to the business. When quality assurance is a priority for a company, it sets the tone for the whole business. The drive for quality infuses every part of an organisation and everyone has a role to play in ensuring quality.

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The QA Process

Bugs will happen; they’re an inevitable part of the software development cycle. Late-stage functionality issues inevitably cause delays and hurried fixes, and ruined developers’ schedules, and mess up the resources planned for other activities. In such case, a QA analysts role can assist in setting and maintaining high quality standards and shift focus from detecting issues to their prevention through the use of various tools & methodology. Organised testing processes and having a clear test implementation strategy will allow you to allocate the resources more strategically and catch the bugs before they cost more work hours. Typically, a quality assurance team member possesses technical skills and expertise that enables them to use tools for maintaining compliance and resolving issues before they become a showstopper.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. A/B testing is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.

A/B testing allows individuals, teams and companies to make careful changes to their user experiences while collecting data on the results. This allows them to construct hypotheses and to learn why certain elements of their experiences impact user behaviour. A/B testing can also be used by product developers and designers to demonstrate the impact of new features or changes to a user experience. Product onboarding, user engagement, modals and in-product experiences can all be optimised with A/B testing.

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Cypress

Cypress is an open-source test automation tool that aims to provide a more straightforward and developer-friendly web application testing experience. It utilises a DOM manipulation technique and directly interacts with browsers without the need for separate browser-specific drivers. Cypress is fully JavaScript-based with an emphasis on frontend testing. Additionally, it comes with an inbuilt test runner GUI that provides an interactive testing environment.

The are several benefits for your organisation when using Cypress. First is it is a developer-focused testing platform with the ability to get up and running quickly. It also eliminates the need to set up or configure browser-specific drivers since it only works on Chrome. The second, it has the ability capture snapshots of tests at execution time with excellent support for modern javascript frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, etc. Third, it has built-in support for integration with CI tools, slack, and Github, as well as, automatic load balancing and parallelisation support. And, lastly, it is fast! Developers don’t like test suites that take hours to run. They want a tool that runs their tests, on their app, in a few minutes.

Conclusion

A QA team, working on piece of software, will work with a Solution Architect and Project Team to analyse the requirements, define the parameters that determine if the product meets their needs, and create a set of testing cases and scripts. These are then used to ensure that the client is getting what they want. The team also supervises the execution of these test cases and scripts, and will perform manual testing to ensure that they are all working as required, without any bugs. They also test the final product before it is handed over to the client as part of quality control.

Without quality assurance, software development could be quite unreliable, with products potentially requiring complete do-overs if flaws proved too widespread or intrinsic.

If your business needs help with Quality Assurance and/or testing your digital products or solutions then please get in touch.