In today’s fast-moving digital environment, there appears to be software at almost every turn in our lives. Mobile apps and web platforms make every task more manageable, quicker, and user-friendly. The QA process ensures the quality of software and conforms it to the specified requirements but also meets end-user expectations. Let us now have a look at what software quality management is.
Software Quality Management
Software quality management is also known as ‘a field of practice and study describing the needed software product attributes,’ which means your software should be free from any defects or issues and render all quality attributes that align with the user-specified requirements.
The process of quality management in software deals with the development and management of the quality of the software, whereby you can ensure that your product meets every expected quality standard set by the customer. Let us now have a deeper look at what quality assurance is.
What is QA?
Quality assurance is a process that involves developing software that matches the quality standards specified by the user. This includes defect prevention, detection, and fixing of issues and problems with an upgrade in the overall quality of the software under test during its life cycle.
Quality assurance (QA) is part of the quality system to ensure consistent and reliable performance, high customer satisfaction, and full compliance with user-specified requirements. QA helps developers ensure that, at the time of development, customers will receive a defect-free product by preventing mistakes. Some of the qualities of the quality assurance process are mentioned below.
Process-oriented:
QA focuses on improving and perfecting the activities in software development that can introduce defects in the product.
Proactive:
While QC is a testing-focused methodology performed to discover the flaws after the development of the product, QA is a preventive methodology that tries to eliminate flaws or issues during the product development life cycle.
Standardization:
Quality assurance is concerned with ensuring quality across various teams and projects because the need to maintain predefined standards and specifications is the utmost priority in the industry. Let us now have a look at the difference between QA and QC.
QA vs. QC
QA and QC are both misused and used interchangeably in many scenarios, which confuses the users because both of them are not similar and have different meanings. QA is focused on the management of the process and deals with defect prevention. Which means, it is related to the process of software development. On the other hand, QC involves product testing and inspection for defect detection after the product has been made, which means it comes into play once the software is developed.
Let us now move on to understanding the significance of the QA process.
Significance of QA
The quality assurance process carries a lot of significance in the software development life cycle as it helps developers in many aspects to ensure the development of a better product that is traceable to the need and required specification while not exceeding the budget. The significance of QA is illustrated in more detailed form in the following points:-
Improving Cost Efficiency
QA helps in the identification and mitigation of defects at a very early stage which requires a considerably lower cost than defect identification and removal after the development phase. Thus, QA reduces the overall cost by helping developers save the overall cost of repair by detecting defects during the development phase.
Customer satisfaction improvement
High-quality software means fewer bugs and better performance, it involves a seamless user experience. Quality assurance ensures that the software entirely meets the user’s requirements and gives them a pleasant feel while using it, which enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Mitigating Risks
Effective QA practices help in uncovering and fixing any potential risks in the early phases of development. This includes functional risks in which the software fails to perform according to expectation, technical risks in which software compatibility and performance are lacking, and business risks, such as missing market deadlines and losing customer trust. Mitigating these risks will ensure QA that the reliability of the software is guaranteed in every scenario.
Boosting Product Reliability
QA helps in making software reliable by executing the same functionality across different scenarios and user environments. Reliable software helps in building trust among users, which is a crucial factor in building brand image in the competitive software market.
Methods of Performing QA
QA encompasses a variety of techniques and methodologies to ensure comprehensive testing and quality control throughout the SDLC.
Manual Testing
Manual testing is a process of testing where testers execute test cases without using automation tools. It’s a traditional method used in QA testing, but it’s time-consuming and requires multiple resources to give insight into how the web application or product works on different platforms. Manual testing further has subcategories, as follows:
Exploratory Testing: Testers test software without following any predefined test cases to find unexpected problems.
Usability Testing: To determine whether the software’s user interface and overall user experience are perfect.
Ad Hoc Testing: This is unstructured testing, performed without formal test cases in a scenario when the tester has excellent knowledge and experience.
Automated Testing
Automated testing is a testing technique that runs all tests automatically based on tools and scripts. It is well-suited for repetitive tests and large-scale regression testing. Automation testing increases efficiency and makes it possible to improve test coverage.
Black Box Testing
In black box testing, the software’s functionality is tested without any knowledge of the internal code structure. The testers evaluate inputs against expected outputs. In this testing technique testers are only concerned with ‘what’, not with ‘how’. Standard black box testing techniques include:
Functional Testing: It checks the software’s functional components to see if it works as required.
System Testing: This is where the complete and integrated software system will be checked.
Acceptance Testing: It guarantees that the software created aligns with the requirements and specifications and is ready for use.
White Box Testing
White box testing is also known as clear or glass box testing. This testing technique involves testing the application from its internal structures or workings. The testers can check the code of the product as well as ensure that the execution paths are followed properly and enhance the efficiency of the code. White box testing covers:
Code Coverage Analysis: It shows the percentage of code exercised by running tests through it.
Path testing: This testing technique performs all the possible path testing through the code.
Mutation Testing: This is a testing technique that introduces changes in the code and checks if the existing test cases can detect these changes.
Regression Testing
The Regression testing technique is a black-box testing technique in which the entire product is tested repeatedly, whenever it goes through any changes, whether the addition of any functionality or removal of any functionality, to check whether the software works properly after the removal or addition of the functionality.
Performance testing
Performance testing checks software behavior under various conditions and assures that it can handle expected and peak user loads. Different types of performance testing include:
Load Testing: Enables the running of tests to understand software behavior under expected user load.
Stress Testing: It determines the behavior of the software under extreme conditions.
Scalability Testing: This test is carried out to verify whether the software scales up with an increasing user load.
Security Testing
Security testing determines vulnerabilities and potential threats that may exist within the software. This is important for the protection of sensitive data and for compliance with the predefined security standards.
Some techniques are:
Penetration testing: Simulates attacks to find vulnerabilities.
Security Scanning: This activity represents automated tools for finding known vulnerabilities.
Risk Assessment: This involves assessing the security measures of the software.
How LambdaTest Can Help in QA?
LambdaTest is one of the leading cloud-based testing platforms that offers developers and testers a plethora of functionalities and capabilities to develop a better QA process and perform it more efficiently as well as more effectively.
Cross-Browser Testing
LambdaTest provides a comprehensive infrastructure for testing web applications across various browsers and operating systems. This ensures compatibility and consistency while helping testers and developers identify and resolve browser-related issues effectively. LambdaTest supports over 3000 browser and OS combinations, making it a valuable tool for ensuring cross-browser compatibility.
Automated Testing Support
LambdaTest integrates the most powerful automation testing frameworks, like Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright, which empowers the QA teams to run automated tests on cloud infrastructure, which will increase test speed significantly. Moreover, the tests can also be executed in parallel on the platform, which results in increased efficiency and reduced test execution time.
Real-Time Testing
LambdaTest provides real-time testing features that allow QA professionals to interact with their applications in real browsers and operating systems. It is essential for debugging and solving problems that are difficult to solve in a local development environment. The live testing feature at LambdaTest enables testers to run manual tests and inspect web applications in real time.
SmartUI Testing
LambdaTest provides AI-powered features for visual regression testing and test intelligence. Visual regression testing involves the detection of UI issues at the user interface level of the application through comparison between two different app screenshot versions. In this way, test intelligence uses artificial intelligence to pick critical tests that should be run based on recent code changes and improve efficiency.
Integrating CI/CD Pipelines
LambdaTest integrates with all of the primary CI/CD tools available in markets, such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and CircleCI, which enables continuous testing and deployment. The integration helps them bring a detailed approach to the overall development cycle by using quality checks into the development lifecycle. Integrating LambdaTest into CI/CD pipeline automation based on testing processes will help in achieving instant feedback against code changes.
Scalability and Collaboration
LambdaTest’s cloud infrastructure empowers QA teams to use the scalability feature which means they can easily scale up or scale down the infrastructure according to their testing needs. This will help in checking whether the product is working well in different scenarios.
Conclusion
In conclusion, QA testing is very important in determining that a developed website or software performs well on every platform. However, the testing process might be time-consuming but many testing tools are available on the web that are efficient and more effective, as they offer comprehensive solutions for QA testing by providing a range of features and capabilities to ensure a high-quality user experience.
This way, QA professionals can continuously check if the product or the software is compatible, fast, secure, and easy to use across different platforms and devices while immediately addressing any problems that may arise. This will ultimately help organizations reach out to new customers as well as regain the older ones.