Quality assurance is something many businesses neglect. Why? In some cases, it’s simply a matter of time. Modern businesses expand, produce, and develop at speeds never seen before. Another reason why companies tend to skip QA is staff. Although a company might have the necessary engineers and administrators to produce that next great app or service, they might not have a department with enough employees for what should be a last line of defense against problems.
But when a business skips or skimps on quality assurance, that brilliant idea faces issues, bugs, vulnerabilities, or (even worse) failure. Such is the nature of a landscape that faces real-time demands and immediate releases and updates.
Because your business depends on and thrives on software development, you need to employ quality assurance. And if you don’t have the staff to make this happen, you might well have to outsource Quality Assurance, to ensure it not only happens but that it happens with a level of reliability your business requires.
But before we get into the “why?”, let’s examine what quality assurance is.
What is Quality Assurance?
After your developers have spent weeks, months, or even years building an application, that software needs to be tested. If you don’t test your software before release, you have no idea if it’s up to the task. And given how competitive the application market is, your company can’t suffer the setbacks associated with untested software.
According to “Maximize the Quality of your Apps with Top QA & Software Testing Services“, the testing phase can include the likes of:
- App testing
- Load testing
- Cloud testing
- Functional testing
- Automation testing
- API testing
- Mobile app testing
- Independent testing
- Manual testing
- Security testing
- Performance testing
- Discovery of hidden issues
Benefits of Software Testing
There are many benefits of software testing (aka QA testing). Those benefits include:
#1 Anticipates Fatal Issues
Functional problems that arise with certain software, especially those that operate with sensitive data, can lead to communication breakdowns, massive blackouts, and data leaks. Performance testing and QA make sure there is no room for errors.
#2 Enhances User Experience
UX ensures the delivery of flawless software: simple, easy to use, intuitive, free of errors, and efficient. A detailed testing process will guarantee customers are presented with a valuable, reliable, and highly interactive end product.
#3 Saves Money
Software testing maximizes product cost-effectiveness. Early detection of bugs and issues avoids great costs further along the line. It is much more expensive to fix problems when the development process is advanced or when the product is finished.
#4 Inhibits Targeted Attacks
Continuous testing maintains and upholds software security, eliminating weaker pieces of code and errors. This way, the end product has a robust and powerful architecture that keeps data protected. Reliable and trustworthy products should always be a priority.
The Difference Between QA and Software Testing
It’s important to note that Quality Assurance and Software Testing are not exactly the same things (although they are often interchanged). While software testing is limited to the testing of the code and the functionality of the software your company generates, Quality Assurance goes beyond that.
Where Software Testing focuses primarily on the actual code, Quality Assurance is much broader and integrates a series of activities and methods to examine the whole product life cycle to guarantee the efficiency of the entire process—from concept, to design, to development, to deployment, to documentation, to maintenance.
There are two principles that guide Quality Assurance:
• Fit for purpose
• Right first time
In other words, does the software you are creating fit its intended purpose, and are mistakes found in the software dealt with immediately.
Why use BairesDev for QA?
With BairesDev, you’ll get quality assurance engineers of the highest caliber. The BairesDev Software Testing team works as an independent division and includes over 60 highly-qualified engineers, who have completed hundreds of QA software testing projects.
The BairesDev approach to software testing and QA is a comprehensive, end-to-end process that starts with QA Consulting to provide a documented analysis of your project. The next phase is full-cycle QA, which goes from development to implementation, to maintenance. Moving on, the BairesDev QA process transitions to the documentation phase, which includes various types of clearly structured documents, created specifically for the target audience.
Next comes the Test Automation phase, which includes custom test development as well as out-of-the-box test automation, based on goals, technologies, and infrastructure. This process is followed by the Software Testing phase, which includes web, load, desktop, mobile, and/or server-side testing. Finally, the QA process is completed with Pre-Certification and Compliance Testing to ensure your software follows such standards as PCI DSS, Section 508, UK, and European accessibility standards.
