Imagine you purchased a new dress for your birthday. The dress fits you like a glove and the colour suits you. And on top of that, the dress wasn’t exactly cheap. Your wore the dress on your birthday and people complimented you. However after 3 months the stitches started coming out as a result of which the dress started to rip off. Your favourite dress now lays at the back of your closet.
This is why the quality of a dress is so vital and crucial. You couldn’t wear it properly and it already got spoiled. You could apply the same concept with software testing and quality assurance. So this article will give you an overview of why quality assurance is important.
What is Quality Assurance?
Quality assurance is a process by which the quality of the software is evaluated against a predetermined criteria.
What does software quality assurance aim to achieve? SQA works along with the software development life cycle; it is not merely a stage in the development process. Businesses must ensure that all internal and external software components meet the established standards. Every component of this procedure is put through individual SQA testing to find problems before they become significant ones.
Businesses assess efficiency, dependability, and maintenance costs outside.
Structure, complexity, readability, adaptability, testability, and the coding techniques used to construct the software are internal qualities that are examined by software QA processes.
Importance of Quality Assurance
- High Quality product: Quality assurance of software ensures that the software is evaluated against the predetermined criteria, i.e, standards, guidelines and certain rules. At the same time it guarantees that the software meets most of these criteria therefore making the software more reliable, user friendly and of superior quality.
- Inspects the security of the software: Quality assurance forces the organization to make their software comply with the security standards related to data privacy. Therefore, it inspects the security of the software and ensures that the software is reliable, secure and trustworthy.
- Reduces the time and money spent: Quality assurance of software testing makes the testers detect the bugs or errors at an earlier stage, thereby saving the time, money and other resources of the company.
- Ensures customer satisfaction: If all the above points are there in a software then obviously the customer will be satisfied. At the end of the day what a customer demands is a good quality product which is reliable and trustworthy.
- Defines your company’s reputation: Businesses have to launch a product which is error free or make sure that the customers don’t catch the error before them. Quality assurance ensures that the software is error free thereby protecting the company’s reputation.
How To Implement Quality Assurance?
- Clearly state the requirements for the quality criteria that your programme must adhere to. Determining specifications, acceptability standards, and performance measurements are all part of this process. All parties involved, particularly the research and development team, management, and customers, should concur on these criteria.
- Create SQA plans: Create a schedule for the SQA tasks that will be carried out over the course of the software development life cycle. Activities for this strategy should involve reviews, testing, and documentation. Additionally, it should state who will be in charge of each task as well as when it will be completed.
- Conducting review: A different team should be assigned with the work of reviews of software artefacts such as requirements, design documents, and code. This maintains the independent nature of the team as well as detects the errors at an early stage.
- Perform testing: Carry out various testing techniques, including acceptability, system, integration, and unit testing. Utilize automated testing technologies to improve productivity and lower the possibility of human error.
- Throughout the development process, keep an eye on the software product’s quality by taking measurements. This entails keeping track of bugs, doing root cause analyses, and analyzing metrics like code coverage and fault density.
Quality Assurance Approaches
This approach basically focuses on controlling or eliminating software quality defects or issues. Now the next question that arises is how will you control such defects? Mainly by monitoring it or tracking the errors. Defects can typically be categorized based on their severity. Using tools like simple control charts software development teams can increase the efficiency of the software thereby improving its quality.
Other than this there is Traditional approach, agile approach. The Agile approach to SQA is an iterative, incremental, and flexible approach that focuses on delivering software products in small increments. The conventional strategy, commonly referred to as the “Waterfall mode,” involves a sequential process where each stage of the software development lifecycle is finished before going on to the next one.
Conclusion
Finally we can say that Quality assurance is extremely important and crucial for any organization or company since it maintains the quality against the predetermined standards. It involves continuous monitoring and improvement of software development processes to identify and eliminate defects and errors in the software product.
