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How to turn your software quality assurance strategy robust?

Author: Diya Jones
by Diya Jones
Posted: Sep 05, 2018

The IT landscape seems to be in perennial flux thanks to factors such as rising cyber threats, evolving technologies, increased competition, and changing market dynamics and user preferences. Add to these the myriad compliance and regulatory protocols and challenges thrown up by mergers, collaborations, and acquisitions, and you have a complex scenario. To address these, businesses should incorporate robust software quality assurance practices. These can help businesses meet their objectives of delivering quality products and services quickly and at cost effective rates.

Moreover, the fact that customers have become increasingly demanding has necessitated businesses to enhance their product quality, hasten the delivery timeframe, and shore up their feedback mechanism. The end users expect a robust customer service that works round the clock providing quick, reliable, and relevant pieces of information. These challenges have led businesses to streamline their development, testing, delivery, and operations processes through a centralized mechanism. The mechanism is underpinned on robust QA software testing to ensure value addition to the business.

Creating business value with software quality assurance

  • The QA software testing team should understand the business objectives and the criticality of applications in addressing them. The team should be able to pre-empt glitches in the business processes, especially in the critical ones.
  • The test team should take into consideration the end user experience. The entire QA processes should be geared towards validating the application so that it delivers a rich user experience.
  • Ensure the test cases cover an extended area and do not leave any area unmapped. This way, the software quality assurance testing strategy can be turned robust and effective.
  • The test outcomes should be measured against crucial business metrics. This helps to determine the effectiveness of the tests as well as apprising the stakeholders (read management) of their criticality.

Business stakeholders have understood that it is no longer about meeting the business objectives alone but providing customer satisfaction. The addition of this crucial metric in the overall business lifecycle has meant products or services should not only be robust, attractive, and functional but secure and multi-dimensional as well. For example, a financial app apart from providing secure financial services should offer sundry utility services as well such as booking tickets, paying bills etc. Moreover, it should perform on all types of OS platforms, devices, screen resolutions, frameworks, and networks.

Steps to make your quality assurance software testing services robust

Test automation: A robust software would mean the near absence of glitches and the ability to seamlessly interact with various platforms, devices, frameworks, and networks. The best way to achieve the same is by adopting test automation, for its ability to carry out repetitive testing quickly and consistently. Besides, since the test cases can be reused for multiple scenarios, the cost on rework can be avoided.

Also, the test automation platforms offer the flexibility and ease of writing text scripts in multiple programming languages. This approach can optimize the use of an automated test platform. However, to ensure test automation meets its desired objectives including cost savings, the platform should be chosen with care (read licensed or open source.)

Test Center of Excellence (TCoE): If an organization has multiple processes, departments, and branches, the test teams and procedures can vary as well. This approach can breed inconsistency in the quality of the final product. Hence, it is better to create a testing center of excellence wherein all testing tools, platforms, protocols, and methodologies are centralized. Once each and every department or process within an organization uses similar but robust QA practices, the outcomes will be consistent in terms of quality.

Agile and DevOps: The traditional waterfall model has QA coming after the development stage in the overall SDLC. This leads to a lot of coordination issues not to speak of the glitches remaining unchecked or needing a rework. The remedy to this approach has come in the form of shift-left testing aka Agile wherein development and testing function as a single team in quick sprints. Furthermore, to ensure customers enjoy a rich experience in terms of prompt redressal of their complaints as well as periodic updation of software, the operations team is also brought into the whole QA ecosystem a la DevOps.

Conclusion

Software testing has emerged as the most crucial dimension of the SDLC. To uphold the quality of products or services in terms of their functionality, performance, usability, and security, they should undergo a rigorous and robust QA strategy
About the Author

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Software Testing Services Company to be appraised at Cmmi-Svc v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also Iso 9001:2015 & Iso 27001:2013 certified.

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Author: Diya Jones

Diya Jones

Member since: Apr 18, 2018
Published articles: 136

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