Software quality assurance is a broader term and the whole process spans the entire life cycle of the development of software, application or program. Below are some of the best practices, that a quality assurance tester should apply:
Include Risk Management with Quality assurance
Most people think that QA is a synonym to testing but actually, quality assurance is a much broader term. Risk management, as well as other processes and activities, should be considered a part of assuring the quality of your product. It is one of the building blocks of adequate quality assurance.
A good quote that sums it up is:
Good Risk Management Includes a Real Improvement of Software Development to Organize Quality Assurance Activities.
Cover entire SDLC
Software Quality Assurance is a concept that should span across the entire lifecycle of software development and the entire self-development process. . Testing start from requirements and its a continuous process even after release the product/updates.
Focus on improvement in quality.
The QA testing should focus on improving the process of development of software in order to optimize the end products’ quality. The aim of the quality assurance process is to provide assurance to climb senior management and other stakeholders that the processes and activities used through the development of your software are designed to maintain the high quality of the end product.
Continuous monitoring
It involves the continuous monitoring of the process and making sure that the agreed-upon standards and procedures are being followed all along the development process. Monitoring systems can show data about usage of features, errors that customers face and traffic load of the system.
Reduce maintenance cost
The maintenance cost of the software is also reduced since the software requires less modification afterward with adequate QA. Of course, the correction and modification of errors that are discovered only after the software’s release and implementation can be costly and might affect the reputation of your company. So, it is important that QA procedures would identify errors sooner before the software gets released therefore resulting in the overall reduction of the entire lifecycle cost.
Transform entire organizational culture
The Quality Assurance and testing process should spend the entire lifecycle of the product and every stage of the process of delivery production or maintenance should be covered by QA. The concept of Quality Assurance isn’t to test your software all at once at the end to report the bugs and then fix those bugs but is to create a quality product in the first place and then also test the quality product so in order for QA to work and to result in real process improvement. The entire organizational Culture has to be transformed and QA has become a continuous effort.
Formulate requirements concisely
Good Quality Assurance starts with requirements.The way requirements are captured, phrased, prioritized and managed greatly affects the quality of the end product. This means that requirements are formulated in a concise and easy-to-understand manner is crucial and this helps developers as well since they can understand what is required of them and more functionality is needed as the lifecycle moves on.
Consider End user’s mindset
Testing is one of the key points of quality assurance so while unit tests and good development practices ensure that you’re building your product correctly; QA and testing also try to make sure that what you’re actually building is also correct. This means that the tester mindset focuses more on the end user.
100% bug-free product is not possible
Almost no software can be completely error-free. Which means, nothing ever goes live without bugs and the objective of the QA is not to fully test everything and fix every single bug but to work together with coding to keep the worst ones out of production and only release working products that fit their intended purposes. Always there will be issues, the main focus of QA process is to eliminate most critical and go down to the severity pyramid.
Original article: https://www.deviqa.com/blog/20-software-quality-assurance-best-practices/