Quality Assurance QA is any systematic process for determining whether a product or service meets certain requirements. The standard establishes and supports established requirements for the development or manufacture of reliable products. The quality assurance system is designed to increase customer confidence and credibility, as well as improve work processes and efficiency, and allows the company to better compete with other companies in the market.
The basics of the standard
The ISO of ISO is the driving force behind QA practice, and it displays the processes used for implementation. The standard is often combined with the international standard ISO 9000. Many companies use it to provide their effective quality assurance system.
The concept of QA as a formalized practice began in the manufacturing industry, and since then it has spread to most industries, including software development. Some people may confuse the term "quality assurance" QA with QC quality control.
Although the two concepts have some similarities, there are serious differences between them:
- In fact, QA is a process that ensures compliance with the general principles for leadership used in any project. And QC is a production oriented process.
- QA is any systematic process for ensuring that a product meets certain requirements. Whereas the QC addresses other problems, such as individual checks or defects.
- As for software development, QA methods are a line of work to prevent code or product crashes, while QC implements testing, troubleshoots, and corrects code.
Although the use of simplest quality assurance concepts can be traced back to the Middle Ages, quality assurance practices became state policy in the United States during World War II when large quantities of ammunition had to be checked.
ISO opened in Geneva in 1947 and published its first standard in 1951 on reference temperatures for industrial measurements. ISO has gradually grown and expanded the scope of standards. The ISO 9000 family of standards was published in 1987, with each number 9,000 offering different standards for different scenarios.
The latest in the ISO 9000 series is ISO 9 001: 2015. Its leadership includes a clearer customer focus, company management practices and how they can change it while supporting continuous improvement.
Quality Assurance in Software
Software Quality Assurance (SQA) systematically finds the patterns and actions needed to improve development cycles. Finding and fixing coding errors can lead to unforeseen consequences. So, you can fix one code, but at the same time disrupt other functions.
SQA has become important for developers as a means of avoiding errors before they occur, thereby reducing development time and costs. Even with testing processes, a software update may interfere with other functions.
There are numerous SQA strategies. For example, the integration of the CMMI Health Stability Model is a performance-oriented SQA model. CMMI works by ranking maturity levels within an organization and identifies optimizations that can be used to improve. Ranking levels range from disorganized to optimal.
Over time, SQA-based software development methodologies have been developed, such as Waterfall, Agile, and Scrum. Each development process is aimed at optimizing work efficiency:
- Waterfall is a traditional linear approach to software development, a step-by-step process that usually involves collecting requirements, designing a design, implementing a code, QA tester, and fixing a code. It is often considered too slow, so alternative development methods have been developed.
- Agile is a team-oriented software development technique in which every step in the process is considered a sprint. Flexible software development is very adaptive, it helps simplify pq ef ae QA, but it is less predictable, because the scale of the project can easily change.
- Scrum is a combination of both processes in which developers are divided into teams to process specific tasks, and each task is divided into several sprints.
Tools and software platforms
Software testing is an integral part of ensuring its quality. It saves time, effort and cost, and also allows you to optimally produce a high-quality final product. There are many software tools and platforms that developers can use to automate and organize testing to facilitate the achievement of SQA goals.
Selenium is an open source software testing program that can run in various popular software languages such as C #, Java, and Python.
Another open source program called Jenkins allows developers and QA employees to run and test code in real time. It is well suited for a fast-paced environment because it automates the tasks associated with software development and testing.
For web applications or application interfaces, Postman automates and runs tests. It is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux and can support Swagger and RAML formatting.
Ensuring software reliability is associated with three key aspects: time, cost and quality. The user must be sure that the software is checked quickly, thoroughly and, of course, professionally, in order to get the best results.
Automation: ways to ensure quality
Among other things, the QA tester would like to reduce the time spent on testing, his task is to maximize the use of process automation. This will require much less time than with the manual version, and will be correct for regression testing. For the same regression analysis, the manual method will take several days, and automation will cope in a matter of minutes. In addition, the same script can be run over and over again using parallel testing.
Other benefits of automation:
- Cost is an important element in which automation creates a win-win situation. The money spent on automation tools quickly pays for itself by reducing the time it takes to use professionals. For a software company, the cost of testing has an upward curve due to growing applications and increased testing costs.
- Less QA resources are required since automation is designed for all manual tasks.
However, test automation and automated testing are not the same thing.
QA automation is the act of conducting specific tests using automation, as opposed to doing them manually. While automation refers to automating the process of tracking and managing various checks. Both automatic control and test automation are important for a continuous process.
Continuous testing
This is a relatively new approach to software testing. Its goal is to ensure quality at all times. In a traditional environment, testing ends at the end of the development cycle. But as more and more companies move to the DevOps model and continuous delivery, in which the software is constantly under development and should always be ready for deployment.
This is where continuous testing takes place - to ensure quality at every stage of development, while testing takes place in small areas all the time, as soon as the need arises. While quality assurance at all times is paramount to this model, there is more to it than that. The speed with which development and testing takes place is also of great importance.
The need to release new software faster and more regularly paved the way for this model. Managing all your needs in a continuous testing environment is a massive undertaking that requires tremendous communication work. The method allows you to track which environments deployed the new code, which part needs testing and how these requirements are integrated into the continuous software delivery process.
Moving for Embrace
Theoretically, the automation concept is ideal for testers working in a continuous environment. But in reality, everything can happen a little differently. In a typical real-world scenario, when testers need to plan and test test cases, they communicate with the product owner to collect product requirements and understand the essence of the problem that he is trying to solve to create functioning software. This often requires working with a team of developers, analysts and operators. At this stage, a combination of test cases (automated, search, regression, and others) is fixed to fulfill the contract in accordance with the requirements.
As DevOps and continuous delivery models are becoming the norm, so is continuous testing. And in order to make continuous efforts successful, testers need to start thinking about what it takes to manage the changes that occur when making adjustments throughout the development pipeline.
Fields of application
QA - Quality Assurance Services that streamline and simplify routine testing with minimal sets of scripts. They increase accuracy, because they perform the same steps absolutely clearly, providing quick and reliable feedback for both management and software developers.
This quality standard is used by:
- Enterprises that seek to reduce innovation cycles and time to market for software.
- Firms that want a reliable test repetition at every stage to ensure uncompromising product quality.
- Technical teams who want to build automatic testing of new projects or apply automation to existing manual verification processes.
- Multi-module projects that need effective dependency management and automatic reporting.
Application Benefits:
- Getting top-quality software as more reliable testing sessions are performed.
- Price reduction, because the standard reduces the number of required qualified personnel.
- Access to highly qualified specialists.
- Optimization, QA solutions avoid multiple repetitive tasks.
- Testing accuracy, consistent results are provided, which are not always available with the manual method.
- An increase in test coverage, which is not possible with the manual method.
- Increase the volume and depth of tests.
- Shorten the cycle of innovation and time to market.
Testing Team
In order to fulfill the requirements of standards in software, you need a team of professionals. This is a special activity of IT-specialists. Part of a career at SQA includes job options such as engineering analytics and SQA test automation. QA engineers monitor and test the software. An SQA analyst will monitor the implications and practices regarding software development cycles. Automation requires a person to create programs to automate the SQA process.
This is hard work. Since people are by nature capable of making mistakes. You need to imagine the conditions under which the tester works, which passes the similar test for the hundredth time, and there is a chance that he will miss something. Even if he is very experienced and if a simple test script, it is still very difficult to avoid errors, especially with manual testing.
Systems Engineer
QA engineering is performed by an engineer and includes the development and conduct of search and automated tests to ensure product quality. His responsibilities include the development and implementation of tests, the debugging and determination of corrective actions. They play an important role in the company's product development process.
The ideal candidate will be responsible for conducting tests before launching the product for smooth software operation. Ultimately, he must monitor all stages of software development to identify and troubleshoot the system so that it can meet quality standards.
QA engineering requirements for engineers:
- Experience in software development.
- Experience with software quality assurance.
- Knowledge of QA software methodologies, tools and processes
Quality standard tester
QA Tester performs software quality assessments using manual and automated testing. He is responsible for detecting and reporting errors and failures. In this role, he must have a keen eye for detail and excellent communication skills.
Junior QA's responsibilities include:
- View and analyze system specifications.
- Execution of test scripts and viewing the results.
- Reporting and documentation of technical issues.
- Collaborate with QA Engineers to develop effective test strategies and plans.
- Report bugs and errors to development teams.
- QA tester troubleshooting help.
- Testing after release and after implementation.
- Work with multi-functional teams to ensure quality throughout the entire software development life cycle.
Tips for Adapting
Currently, each enterprise needs to adapt the digital strategies of its product in order to coordinate business processes and offer a comprehensive experience in working with clients. QA helps businesses in the digital transformation process. Top business tips:
- Focus on customer experience and brand. QA ensures that applications provide invaluable experience with a range of tests for a specific purpose, such as crowdsourced testing or payment testing Gateway to ensure smooth e-commerce UI.
- Automation. It can be performed at the level of the entire life cycle of the application, use various commercial programs, as well as open source tools.
- Using DevOps and continuous delivery. DevOps focuses on working together on the tasks of developers, operating and IT professionals. Thus, it is an accelerator that works on software development, QA testing, new changes and release cycles.
- Use advanced analytics. It can also help QA qualify the product.
- Establishment of a Test Center of Excellence (TCoE).
- The desire for mobile testing. In addition to calls or messaging, they use mobile applications for matching locations, booking tickets, shopping, paying bills.
Digital transformation actually transforms the lives of IT organizations. Consequently, the roles and responsibilities of QA and testing groups are expanding significantly to help these companies focus more on delivering quality and fast applications.