“Quality over quantity” — Less quantity with great quality lasts longer than more quantity with less quality.
The great blackout that took place in the year 2003 in the Northeast US, causing $10 billion dollar loss was due to error in millions of lines of code and the total bugs cost also incurred a very heavy loss in the reputation of the business. This is just an example of what consequence people and business had to face due to failure to adhere quality assurance, control and management. There are many such consequences businesses faces even today, not being able to deliver quality product.
Incidents like these have marked the importance of quality assurance (QA) more prominent than ever now. In this article, we will discuss on the importance and roles QA plays in business and software development life cycle.
Roles of Quality Assurance Personnel
“Quality Assurance is not a luxury, but a necessity when working in a competitive market.”
A person in in the role of a QA, is someone who consistently questions all parts of the process to ensure the team is producing the desired output with quality in mind and work.
The key focus of quality assurance personnel is to make sure that the value of the project has not been compromised by any means.
Quality Assurance personnel should look at a product with different perspective — they simply should not just look at a product as a collection of HTML, CSS, JS and APIs for example, but as a whole — this means, even though the code may be the best it can be, it doesn’t mean it works in a way that is good for the user.
Myths and facts about quality assurance
Role of QA is just to find bugs.
The role of QA is not just to find what does not works. But, they should make sure that the feature or a product does what it should do and analyze if it looks nice or causes pain in the eyes. Quality assurance personnel are highly involved in analyzing the product with client’s perspective recommending what’s missing or what could be done to have better quality.Anyone can do it.
“What is so difficult about testing a software? This is the easiest job in IT field. This is something anybody can do it!” — Myth
“Anyone can cook, but can everyone make food like a professional chef does in a highly maintained restaurant? Of course not, only those who are highly trained in the culinary arts can.” — Fact
Yes! It is true that anyone can get and start off as a quality assurance engineer. But, it takes great determination and analyzing skills to figure out what’s missing in a so called perfect to launch product and at the same time assure that all the features are running securely as it should have. Understanding product from a client’s perspective and connecting it with the development is a time consuming and tough work, not everyone prefers to do.
Quality Assurance is basically easy said than done job.All testing process must be automated
Testing process is very time consuming since it involves perspective of three different people: client, developers and end users. It is difficult to make sure developers are developing product as per the client and the client’s requirement fits the end users.
Automation is definitely the good approach to get things done in short time period. But, not all the time, it is better to apply hybrid testing which involves both automation and manual test.
Running scripts can tell us if the coordinates are correct, but only human experience and touch can tell us if the buttons are properly placed and displayed.Quality assurance can be left to the final stage.
A number companies follows the process where projects are planned in a planned to go through testing at the end of development. This may seem reasonable as it gives a chance to test entire system all at once and fix the whole system in its integrity.
But. the reality is it is always cheaper to fix bugs earlier on in the development cycle rather than stabilize the completed system with pilled up bugs. Some projects will take months or even years to complete, the developer will have to refresh all the codes he wrote years back in his mind.Security and quality are different activities
Most people thinks that quality assurance and security testing are two different perspective. But, the fact is product is considered a quality product only when it is secured and well maintained. A risk-based approach of identifying and curing vulnerabilities should be used throughout the entire process of development in order to make sure that the product that is about to be delivered is safe for the end users.
Conclusion: The purpose of a proper quality assurance is to find and eliminate flaws hampering the project, and also to make sure the product meets the client’s demand with quality and security in mind. I hope this article helps to clear doubts on why Quality Assurance is important and the role they play in the process.