Everyone agrees that product quality is important. But app development consists of difficult tasks that require a lot of knowledge and work. It’s very easy for something to go wrong. To prevent this, there are Quality Assurance teams that detect and prevent defects as early as possible. Inside this article, you will find out what each person in such a team does and how exactly they ensure project quality.

What does Quality Assurance mean?

People often think of QA only in terms of manual testing. Yet, the concept is much broader, as it’s one of the most crucial processes during software development. This process consists mainly of three aspects: quality control, quality assurance, and quality management. 

Quality Control

Quality control is generally understood as carrying out tests and it includes:

  • verifying the application in terms of whether the software works properly,
  • verification of divergences in terms of requirements specified in the documentation user stories or designs,
  • reporting and archiving bugs with an appropriate amount of information and managing them.

The goal of the testing is to see if any corrections in the production process are required. Companies that have high-quality control are better able to fulfill consumer expectations for improved products.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is an area that goes beyond Quality Control. Its task is to create procedures and improve them. Examples of such actions are:

  • test management,
  • test strategies,
  • test policy,
  • trend observation,
  • human resources management in terms of testing.

Simply said, Quality Assurance is focused on the quality of the procedures, whereas Quality Control is focused on the output quality. Both QA and QC are required for project success. If we merely use QA, we get a set of methods that we may use to verify that our given solution is of high quality, but the provided solution is never truly quality-checked.

Quality Management

Quality management is an area that goes even beyond Quality Assurance. Examples of such actions are:

  • planning and implementing software distribution – for example, stage/pre-prod/prod environments, repository and release process,
  • preventive actions – these are activities designed to help the developer before writing code. A good example is reviewing designs and documentation for logical consistency and creating test cases that can be included in tickets,
  • promoting quality – good quality assurance must promote quality among the team, he/she should be like Sensei who is constantly looking out for quality and reminds the team to pay attention to it.

Overall, those are the general responsibilities of the QA department:

  1. providing information on the quality status of the project,
  2. planning, analysis, execution, and evaluation of tests
  3. reporting and archiving of test results,
  4. answering of how to ensure high quality of software,
  5. selecting tools, making decisions, and setting standards,
  6. implementing testing processes.

The Quality Assurance Team

Various sources of knowledge define many types of testers. Some names have not caught on, while others are used regularly. Testers may be divided by two factors – experience and testing role.

Experience of testers

Without a doubt, experience is quite an individual factor. If you have the right knowledge and skills, there’s no harm in calling yourself a mid with just a year’s experience. 

  • Junior tester – up to about 1 year of testing,
  • Regular tester – up to 2-5 years of experience,
  • Senior tester – about 6 years and more.

Testing roles

We can highlight several positions related to testing. Among the most common is QA Analyst that executes and evaluates the system, document tests, and the status to the QA lead. There’s also QA Automation Engineer that creates automated tests using test cases and plans.

The QA lead works with creating test plans, test management, monitoring the quality delivery on schedule, and leading a test team. Then comes the QA manager position – at this level the QA manager works closely between the client, Business Analyst, Development Lead, and Test team to ensure the final product has the highest quality.

However, you can come across are many more types of testers depending on the specification of the project, tests, or particular responsibilities in the project:

  • API/GUI tester,
  • functional/non-functional tester,
  • performance/usability tester,
  • mobile solutions tester,
  • web solutions tester.

Generally, these roles are often mixed and one tester can perform several of them.

The process of Quality Assurance

Essentially, QA helps with the planning and control of the whole process so that severe difficulties do not arise during the project management. To do this, QA engineers collaborate with other members throughout the whole cycle. Both amount and frequency of QA tasks vary and are largely influenced by the scope of work. 

The following are some of the essential points involved in doing quality assurance:

Training – regular educational meetings to prepare and orient the team about the quality standards to which they should aspire.

Planning – requirements analysis, bugs detection strategy, traceability and testing methods, tools selection. 

Design – reviewing and checking the design from a visual and logical point of view. Submitting corrections to designs or used elements, which the developer will not be able to implement. Checking application flow.

Development – preparing the test environment, assisting developers with technical aspects of implementation that could improve the UX of the UI, creating test cases.

Testing – exploratory/smoke tests, executing test plans, writing test cases, bug reports, documentation updates, frontend/backend testing, tracking and testing updates, test functions, User Acceptance Testing, regression testing, end-to-end tests.

Deployment and maintenance – availability during deployment, preparing guides and manuals, testing bugs that may have gone undetected, checking regression after updates.

The importance of QA in software development

QA is an important part of development, as the fundamental purpose of it is to create a product that meets all the criteria, whether they’re functional or linked to the user experience. Without an experienced team in place, delivering a great digital product will be difficult. Here’s a list of the most beneficial aspects of QA.

Saves money and time

The benefit of putting systems in place throughout development is to prevent the majority of errors and defects from appearing. As a consequence, any faults that will appear are minimal and easy to fix. Without QA most issues would be much larger and only discovered after the application was launched. Afterward, fixing bugs would take not only additional time but also increase costs.

Maintains the quality of the digital product

As already mentioned, the purpose of QA is to verify if the software is reliable and stable to launch. What’s even more important is that tests like that take into account the possibility that a user may not use the application as originally intended. The product will benefit from stability when used inappropriately. 

Increases security

While a piece of software may execute all of its duties as intended, it’s not always totally safe. The data of its consumers might be risked and harmed if its security has any flaws. Quality assurance is so essential because it ensures that the product is developed with protection in mind and security is functional.

Protects reputation

One of the overlooked benefits of QA is that it has the potential to reflect on your business as well as your brand. You may establish a great reputation for a company by delivering exceptional features and comprehensive security. It guarantees that the product is a good representative of the company.

Satisfaction of customers

Your product must meet the demands of your consumers to achieve customer satisfaction. It should contain all of the necessary features and function effectively. The objective of quality assurance is to ensure that the program delivers exactly what your consumers anticipate.

High-quality software tailored to your needs

After reading this article, you should know the role of a QA tester in software development. At Applover, we put a lot of effort into this so that we can guarantee 100% customer satisfaction. If you already have this knowledge at your fingertips and would like to develop it further – join our team! But if you are looking for the high quality of your application, you no longer have to worry about that –  your peace of mind is our full-stack responsibility! Feel free to contact us any time.