In the modern software applications marketplace, the importance of developing a solidly engineered application is drum loud to the ears, and quality assurance testing is crucial to delivering on that expectation.
What is QA?
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The term “QA” as used in this article encompasses both quality control, and testing that is not typically categorized as core quality assurance activity but is often used to mean the same thing.
The Google Testing Blog defined quality assurance as “the continuous and consistent improvement and maintenance of process that enables the QC job”.
Quality control according to Investopedia is the “process through which a business seeks to ensure that product quality is maintained or improved and manufacturing errors are reduced or eliminated”.
In a classic example of software incidents that caused huge damage and highlights the importance of QA testing, a global financial firm in 2012 experienced an error in its automated system for the sale of equity orders that cost the company to lose over $400 million in less than 45 minutes due to the deployment of untested software.
As a business owner, discovering defects early in the development cycle of your application will save you time, money, and the frustration that comes with making changes to an already deployed software with inconsistencies and errors.
That is why at Alabama Solutions we put focus on the quality of the software we build for our clients and in this article, we will share a few tips to look out for as development agencies build and test your application.
Leverage automation
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The goal of quality assurance testing is to ensure that your product is of the highest possible quality for your customers before it deploys.
In an industry reference blog, a group of software testing professionals with years of experience in the software testing industry defined software quality as “the degree of conformance to explicit or implicit requirements and expectations” and on several occasions, the amount of scenarios that need to be tested for before an application is ready for deploy is so much that manual testing alone becomes impractical.
Ideally, as a founder building software, your agency’s quality assurance testing methodology should combine both manual and automated testing with the aim of reducing the number of unfound issues within your software.
Leveraging automation for testing is both practical and reliable and particularly useful in cases where tests need to be performed repeatedly such as in white box testing, load tests, and other performance testing.
Request QA engineers oversee testing
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There is a well-known concern that developers who create tests for the software they write may unconsciously create a test with limited coverage of expected scenarios or worse become biased and write code that will pass tests without meeting important quality standards. In fact, some development teams without actual QA engineers would create a test plan and then outsource the actual process of testing to dedicated QA engineers.
To avoid incidents of developers being unconsciously mischievous with the project they build for you, ask your agency if they have a full-time QA engineer and specifically request that they oversee testing for your application.
Choose the right testing strategy
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“Strategy for software testing provides a roadmap that describes the steps to be conducted as part of testing when these steps are planned and then undertaken, and how much effort, time, and resources will be required.” — Roger S. Pressman.
To paraphrase tryqa, the choice of test strategy or approaches is one of the most powerful factors in the success of test efforts and the accuracy of test plans and estimates.
As a founder building a software application, you’ll be working with your development agency to choose the best test strategy out of the following strategies to test your app for success before deployment and to avoid catastrophic situations like the one described in the opening paragraphs.
Source: Javapoint
Conclusion
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In conclusion, despite the exhaustive nature of software testing, the potential damage from the neglect of it could be so devastating that the investment of time and effort upfront in rigorous testing of software applications before deployment to a production environment may look silly in retrospect.
In this article, we wanted to share important tips founders and potential entrepreneurs building applications could look out for as they build that would greatly help reduce the possibility of damage to their business reputation caused by poorly tested software in the future.
At Alabama Solutions, we offer clear and strategic advantages for your testing needs with an adequate capacity pool of industry-experienced testing professionals you can request to contact today.
