The software development life cycle starts at Design ideation and ends at quality assurance. Just imagine building software but not checking for any bugs or feature issues before delivering them to the clients. It’s a disaster for any software development team.
With Software Quality Assurance, the engineers, developers, and testers can ensure the safety, security, and operations of the entire software system. The main aim of the software testers is to identify the bugs, detects, vulnerabilities, and technical issues within the software programs.
This is done to identify the issues in advance and fix them before delivering the project to a client. But what exactly is included in the Software Quality Assurance and why it’s important for the software industry? Let’s start learning about this part of the software development life cycle.
What is Quality Assurance Software Testing?
Software Quality Assurance is the methodology used in the software industry for finding bugs and fixing them. This methodology is meant for checking the quality of the software that is being developed.
With Quality Assurance, the software testers perform rigorous testing to find all the security flaws, safety issues, operational conflicts, Bugs, and other things that can hamper usability.
The predefined quality standards and the client requirements are taken into consideration in the entire process of quality assurance. Every software engineer and software tester must know about the importance of software quality assurance.
Importance of Quality Assurance in the Software Industry
Without the quality assurance part in the software development process, the engineers cannot deliver software that is up to the industry standards.
#1 - Reliability
The reliability of the software programs is very important for a better user experience. No one wants to use software that randomly crashes, has numerous technical issues, and does not work the way it’s intended. Hence, Quality Assurance maintains the reliability of the software programs or services.
#2 - High-quality Software
There are numerous quality standards specified in the industry and the custom standards provided by the clients. The quality assurance teams make sure to match the specified and provided standards for the high-quality software programs.
#3 - Enhanced Security
There can be numerous vulnerabilities and security flaws in the software programs that can cause catastrophic damage to the users. The QA standards ensure the identification of such flaws and fixing them before delivering software to the clients.
#4 - Error Reduction
Software is not a full-proof system and it can throw errors once in a while. It’s important to reduce those errors with stringent testing norms. The QA teams ensure that the errors are found and solved as soon as possible to reduce the issues that might arise in the future. This makes the software program robust and reliable in the long run.
#5 - Customer Satisfaction
Customer is the king and when they want software, they need something that works better than their expectations. With the Software Quality Assurance protocols, the testers can perform deep testing to find technical issues and the developers fix them to let customers effortlessly use the software programs.
#6 - Cost Saving
The software development life cycle is quite time-consuming and resource-intensive if the technical issues within the software are identified while in the development phase, it’s easier to fix them in the development phase instead of in the later phases.
#7 - Optimized Development Process
Quality Assurance ensures that the protocols are implemented while in the development phase. With the history of commonly faced technical issues, the entire developmental phase can be optimized to avoid these issues while coding the programs.
What Processes are Included in Software Quality Assurance?
The entire quality assurance cycle has numerous processes included. Let’s check out a few processes that are included in the Quality Assurance protocols.
#1 - Standardization
Defining and documenting the Quality Assurance Standards in the Software Development Life Cycle is the first process of the SQA Protocol. This ensures that the entire lifecycle runs on mandatory standards like ISO 9001 and many others.
#2 - Tests Designing
As the testers have access to all of the requirements and goals of the quality assurance project, they start designing the tests. Depending on the requirements, various tests can be used. These tests are finalized and the software testing is designed.
#3 - Code Reviews
Code Review is a process in which the team analyses the entire codebase of the project. This is to ensure that none of the codes contain any issues. These code reviews are done by the senior software engineers and the QA teams.
#4 - Test Execution
Manual and automatic tests will be executed during this process. The testers and analysts will monitor all the tests to identify the issues, bugs, and errors. This is an important step as the issues missed during the code reviews are highlighted through the tests.
#5 - Release Management
Release Management is a process in Software QA to streamline the software release to the customers. With this process, the QA Team and Developer team can work together to release the software in a phased manner with no issues.
#6 - Feedback Collection
After completing the software release to the customers, collection of the user feedback is essential. The Quality Assurance team collects feedback from the users and uses it to improve the quality and ensure customer satisfaction in the long run.
Final Words
As per the latest market report, the Software Quality Assurance industry is valued at $22.15 Billion globally. This highlights the importance of this part of the SDLC.
Being a critical part of the software development life cycle, Software Quality Assurance Testing ensures customer satisfaction to the next level.
It’s not just about doing the tests and reporting the errors, but ensuring customer satisfaction while reducing the workload and saving costs for the company.
Software testers use a wide range of methods to aggressively check the software programs and services for issues and get them fixed to avoid any unpleasant user experience. The Software QA teams are the reason behind the reliable software programs that we use on a daily basis.