If you are in the process of website development, you are the one who wants to speed up the release. If you are the owner of a software project, you want it to hold steady in the long run. In both cases, it is high time to hire QA specialists.
There are two major ways to establish cooperation with QA teams: in-house and QA outsourcing. In-house teams are costly, but they have a nuanced understanding of your project needs. Outsourced software testing, by comparison, might lack the firsthand vision of a company`s inner processes at the beginning. However, they offer a range of expert solutions aimed at addressing project key goals. Moreover, an independent QA team might turn into a dedicated one after ongoing cooperation and get a deeper understanding of your business needs.
The choice is up to you, but implementing QA best practices into the development strategy on early stages contributes to the overall business growth.
The 2017-2018 World Quality Report states that only 29% of business executives view software testing as a component of business success. At the same time, such world famous companies as Facebook, Google, Spotify have already started organizing their QA to make sure the business delivers services of the highest quality possible.
“I think we will spend as much time on testing tomorrow as we do today, but the tools and the information that we will have and get from our automation will make our testing job different.”
Khristian Karl, Test & Development manager at Spotify
If you are about to start implementing a QA strategy within your project, here are the critical components of its success:
Aligned QA and Business Goals
QA team is rarely involved in planning and usually takes a backseat when it comes to business goals setting. Therefore, it is essential for your team to see the advantages of spending resources on quality assurance. To improve your product quality, communicate the business goals on a company-wide level and figure out what each department tries to achieve. In such a way, executives, testers, and programmers have a shared understanding of the desired product features. QA specialists contribute to timely delivery by exploring new feature specification at the beginning. The role of a tester at the feature planning stage is about preventing defects and detecting them as early as possible to reduce the risks of project failure.
Structured QA Team
Once you identify the QA goals, it is time to think over your team structure. This stage is always individual and must correlate with your business specifics. The size and complexity of the product identify the quantity of QA specialists to be involved in the project as well as their level of competence and skill. If a project requires a large QA team, a professional team lead is to be engaged. The role of a team lead is to prioritize and share the tasks among team members. This person establishes smooth-running cooperation to ensure the whole QA team stays aligned in their goals.
Under effective management, every QA engineer understands their responsibility, communicates individual goals, and contributes to the final result. Meanwhile, a team lead traces the progress, keeps the project under control, and monitors testers` performance.
Long-Term Reliability on QA
Often, organizations go into quality assurance when there is a need for quick fixes or in cases of emergency. To develop effectively, software quality maintenance must become one of the prior tasks in your project. That means QA engineers are to ensure permanent stability and testability of the project on every development stage: from algorithm design, through code writing, compilation phase, to testing & debugging.
Automation Back-Up
Without a doubt, automated testing has proven its effectiveness when thoroughly combined with manual quality assurance. However, it is not a universal means for software maintenance. Apply automated testing as a supporting tool for QA engineers. It is especially useful when it comes to large projects where manual regression testing takes much time. Let your team focus on product parts which require thorough manual testing.
Why start your project together with QA?
In the competitive software environment, it is crucial to make your QA team involved in the earliest stages of the development process. Such approach helps to find contradictory project requirements and establish a well thought out functional background. Even today, the requirements gathering phase contains nearly 50%-60% of bugs. This phase is fundamental for your project and serves as a background for further work to be built on.
Kent Beck and Cindee Andres, the authors of “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change”, 2nd Edition, write:
“catching bugs in the early stages of a project is the cheapest way to ensure software quality. There is a dilemma in software development: defects are expensive, but eliminating them is also costly. However, the number of bugs in the post-release exceed the funds that would have been spent on their prevention.”
This is what happens when testers are integrated into the late development stages:
- The team studies your project “on the go.” QA engineers do not fully elaborate test design due to the limited understanding of projects needs and deadline pressure.
- Requirements risk analysis is skipped, and most of the vague requirements remain unimproved.
- Quality of testing suffers under tight deadlines. Sometimes QA specialists omit testing software on different devices and skip cross-platform bugs.
QA is not only about debugging. It is also about time-saving and reaching long-term business goals while working on any project. So, the sooner a team starts to test the product, the more feedback can be collected, and the more defects can be prevented.
Let`s see why QA accelerates your project delivery:
- Active involvement of QA team would ensure that the software development process adheres to current project goals. QA specialists make sure if the feature planning step is performed correctly.
- If testers take part in requirements elicitation, they have a better picture of the whole project scope. The development team may provide QA engineers with a better plan of the areas that need more profound testing.
- Getting a sense of requirements scope helps QA team to estimate the needed number of test cases with greater confidence. The cases would reflect the key project needs.
- Testers work on usability issues and error messages that can be detected via DevTools Console.
- If QA engineers work on the project from its early stages, they ensure smooth, full-fledged testing process. No need to rush and test the system at random.
- QA provides support for a project development team. Testers recommend the ways to systemize requirements and help to deal with edge case problems.
Sometimes positive fundamental changes begin with changes in mindset. So far, not all executive teams are used to think about project success in terms of software quality assurance. However, a shift to a full-scale QA pattern might be just the thing you need to accelerate the development process and improve its results.