What are the best practices to follow for an Enterprise QA Process?

With customer satisfaction arguably the sole determinant for any enterprise software application to achieve market acceptability and garner high sales, the quality of the application becomes critical. And enterprise QA testing is the mechanism to ensure if the software application meets the expected business and regulatory criteria. The other benefits an enterprise can achieve by pursuing software quality assurance testing are:

• Identifying and fixing glitches early on in the SDLC
• Validating the software’s functionality and performance across devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks
• Ensure the software maintains the Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration objectives of DevOps
• Increased ability of the software to integrate new technologies and third-party software
• Meet compliance requirements and preventing the enterprise from attracting penalties
• Meet users’ expectations and deliver superior user experiences (user-friendly, secure, and stable application)
• Better brand recognition for the enterprise

Given the enhanced role of enterprise QA testing in the SDLC, it should be planned and executed methodically to derive the benefits.

Best practices to establish an enterprise QA process

To begin with, enterprise quality assurance should be comprehensive in its sweep and precise in its execution. QA testers may follow the below-mentioned practices to ensure the application released to the market meets all business and regulatory requirements.

#1 Set testing requirements and goals: The first step should be to understand the client’s expectations about the software and the testing requirements. The knowledge of issues the client wants to address and the criteria he or she wants to follow can enable QA engineers/testers to set up the testing process and get an estimate of the resources and requirements needed for testing. Thereafter, the QA engineers should prioritize the features and functionalities for testing and get relevant information like test specifications, the primary users, and the way users are likely to use the application, among others. At this point, the QA engineers can inform the client about the type of testing needed for the specific application and begin testing based on the latter’s concurrence.

When it comes to reporting, the QA team ought to know the information to include and the type of format to use in preparing the report. With consultations with the client, the QA team can discuss the conditions and frequency of regression testing. Importantly, the QA team needs to finalize the communication schedule and channels (in consultation with the client) to keep the latter in the testing loop. These measures can help the QA team to set up testing goals and requirements, assess the scope, and the tasks to perform as part of the testing process. Moreover, once these are discussed with the client there would be no false expectations from the latter with respect to the scope, cost, and timeline.

#2 Set up a workflow: Since software quality assurance testing is carried out in several stages the QA team should formulate a quality assurance strategy. The first part of the strategy is to create a test plan, which will be followed throughout the SDLC. In this plan, the QA team should establish the scope, criteria, and deadline of testing. Then it is about evaluating the project requirements to check if they meet the quality criteria and address the business objectives. This is preceded by gathering information about the software’s domain to understand the specific criteria the software needs to comply with.

Further, the QA team tests the functionality of each feature to check if it works according to specifications. For product stability, the QA team runs automated regression tests after implementing any new feature or update. This helps the team to evaluate the impact of changes made to the application, and ensure they did not create any bugs or lead to system crashes. The workflow should have the provision for test reporting wherein details of the testing activities and outcomes are mentioned after each test iteration. Not to forget, the workflow should delineate the roles and responsibilities of the QA team to avoid any confusion.

#3 Check for regulatory compliance: The QA team should select the regulatory standards to follow based on the industry and jurisdiction. The regulatory standards may include GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and others, and the team should ensure the software application meets these standards and their corresponding requirements. Regulatory compliance generates better trust in the application among end-users in areas of safety, privacy, and security. Moreover, it precludes the application from attracting harsh penalties.

#4 Automated and manual testing: The key to any successful software quality assurance strategy is combining automated and manual testing approaches instead of choosing one over the other. These can help the QA team to identify deviations of test cases corresponding to different functionalities from their expected behavior, and inform the development team to fix them.

#5 shift-left testing: In the Agile-DevOps approach the QA team works alongside the development team in sprints to identify glitches at every stage of the build. The early identification and elimination of glitches through shift-left testing are considerably cheaper as opposed to fixing them post release. In this process of testing, the customer and business interests are upheld, and a superior quality application gets delivered.

Conclusion

• Well begun is half done,’ so goes the adage, which applies to establishing and pursuing the best practices for

enterprise QA testing. In a day and age where complex software applications like CRM or ERP with multiple functionalities, integrations, and a plethora of security and compatibility challenges, any QA testing services company should follow these best practices. In doing so, it ensures the acceptability of the application in the market and helps the business to generate high sales.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality