QA Strategy – What’s Inside?
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The role of QA strategy in agile is hard to undervalue. In a nutshell, QA or quality assurance is all about ensuring the quality of the final product is high enough. Respectively, the quality assurance strategy is a combination of techniques and actions necessary to test the final version of the software in order to detect weak sides and prevent mistakes before the product is delivered to customers.
The main reason why software QA strategy matters so much is because it plays a significant role in customer satisfaction. Delivering products that haven’t been tested properly often results in significant growth of customers’ discontent. Therefore, a solid software quality strategy is the key to a successful release.
A proper QA strategy, though important, can be pretty hard to shape. In this article, we are going to take you backstage of the QA test strategy to help you learn more about it. Let’s dive in!
How To Create A Perfect QA Testing Strategy?
Since you are reading this article, you have likely already faced certain challenges in the course of developing an effective QA strategy or just want to learn how to develop a solid quality assurance strategy example. To help you handle this matter, we have prepared a comprehensive guide that lists all the steps you need to undertake:
1. Set Clear Goals
Setting clear objectives and timelines is the key to success! Having in mind a clearly defined goal and due date will help a team to be more focused, engaged, and efficient.
Setting objectives can be uneasy. However, there is a universal SMART rule that defines criteria for setting clear and effective goals. According to this rule, every objective has to be:
- S – specific
- M – measurable
- A – attainable
- R – relevant
- T – time based
Use this rule as a tip for setting goals right and you may be surprised how this will transform your agile QA strategy!
2. Keep Your QA Team at The Core
Although quality assurance steps are most often taken at the end of the development, it is vital to ensure that your testing team is at the epicenter of the whole development life cycle from the very beginning.
While a QA team will not be responsible for the processes at all stages of the development, observing the cycle will allow specialists to stay well aware of the product they will have to deal with, as well as the team’s objectives and expectations.
Respectively, if your testers will be aware of everything related to the product, they will know exactly how to approach its testing, which will help them handle QA easier and release software faster.
3. Study As Much Information As Possible
Lack of product understanding and document background often results in poor testing. Therefore, one of the key points in your strategy should be a thorough study of the available test documentation, software architecture, and other data that can give you enough background for solid testing.
4.Automate The Process
Having a good QA automation strategy will help you save time and effort of your team. There is no single work-for-all rule on what processes to automate. However, there is a set of recommendations on what cases to automate that you can keep in mind:
- Tests that run on multiple hardware or software platforms and configurations.
- Repetitive tests that run for numerous builds.
- Tests that require too much time and effort when addressed manually.
- Tests that often cause human error.
- Tests of functionality that is used frequently and introduces high risk conditions.
- Tests that require numerous data sets.
- Ones that can’t be performed manually.
5.But, Don’t Neglect Manual Testing
Although automation should be a part of your overall strategy, it may not be the best idea to focus solely on it. Often, manual and automated testing complement each other. Therefore, mixing these two strategies can help you get better results.
Some of the key cases when you can get a faster and more accurate feedback through manual testing are:
- Not repetitive tests that are only run once or twice.
- Tests that require human observation (for example, when your task is to ensure customer experience or user-friendliness of software).
- Exploratory tests that require actual specialist’s knowledge, skill, and experience.
- Ad-hoc tests.
6. Always Analyze Past Experiences
To make every test productive, don’t forget to analyze and keep in mind past errors, defects, and customer complaints about your software to make sure you won’t have to deal with the same issues again.
With that being said, it is important to not just find bugs in the process of testing, but also analyze why specific issues occurred and what your team can do to prevent them in the future.
7. Don’t Limit Your Focus
Many teams make a huge mistake when they narrow down their focus only on detecting and fixing errors. Our QA testing service, on the contrary, recommends taking a multifaceted approach to the matter. Be proactive and consider all kinds of gaps, including not only software functionality, but also front- and back-end interactions.
Top Software Testing & QA Trends That Can Strengthen Your Strategy
The tips and solutions mentioned above can help you get on the right track and grasp an idea of how to develop a strategy that will work the best for your team.
Now, to make it even better, let’s take a quick look at a few core trends in QA:
- Customer experience is the biggest trend. Currently, almost every software testing company is shifting more towards ensuring higher customer satisfaction rather than merely finding bugs. To secure end-user satisfaction, teams are focusing on putting more effort to capture data their users produce (e.g. make their products more data-driven). Also, teams are adopting such methodologies as CI/CD and Agile to deliver new and updated features to their users faster.
- TDM. Another big thing in software testing today is Test Data Management. Creating a stronger TDM strategy that includes synthetic data and encryption can speed up product delivery.
- QA outsourcing. Today, there is a large number of QA services, which help companies that need assistance with testing to connect with professionals. Currently, over 45% of companies use outsourced IT services including outsource quality assurance, so it seems that it is becoming a new trend. The percent of organizations that use services of external QA testing companies keeps growing, so we believe this trend will stay with us for a while.
- Automation. As technology keeps evolving, we can see each professional software QA service make a lane for AI-driven solutions to reach even more automation.
- Cloud. Another trend worth your attention is the cloud-based infrastructure for applications. The reason why Cloud is a big thing in QA today is because it ensures faster deployment and a shift left approach to automated testing.
The Bottom Line
Understanding the value of thorough testing can help you ensure a higher quality of your products.
Hopefully, this post helped you to grasp an idea of what software quality assurance strategy really is and how it can be implemented to bring you the most benefit.
