Almost every organisation today offers some type of software whether it’s an online catalogue, mobile banking, online check-in tool, etc. If you are a company with any level of digital footprint, you realise that new updates have become regular and require faster roll-out.
Besides, it is crucial to provide a consistent app or software experience with seamless interactions across devices. Today, every single digital experience is a reflection of your brand. Therefore, quality assurance or QA in software testing should be an integral part of your overall testing strategy.
Quality Assurance (QA) ensures consistent improvement and maintenance of processes so that a software meets all quality requirements from both technology and business perspectives.
The recent trend of work from home has increased the likelihood of cyber-attacks. QA in software testing ensures that these and other types of vulnerabilities are flushed out before they reach production. QA as a process spans the entire life cycle of the development of application, program or software.
The Industry-Proven Best Practices of QA
The process of QA is an integral one involving various test cases, test scenarios, and other software testing procedures. Create well-stated objectives and goals, then get started in a secure testing environment.
Here are top ten best practices to improve your quality assurance or QA process in software testing.
- Plan your testing procedures. Defining short-term goals and planning the implementation of sprints allows the QA team to be constantly involved and improve the end result.
- Employ automated testing. Test automation for repetitive tasks that require minimal manual intervention increases speed, accuracy, and increased productivity in your QA process.
- Shift Left practice. It means testing earlier in the software development process to find and prevent defects early. It can also be added here that testing throughout the process helps in tackling errors as you go.
- Multi-directional testing strategy for quicker and better analysis. For instance, start with unit testing, then smoke testing, followed by regression testing, non-functional testing and finally, ending with user acceptance testing to get the right results. It will allow your QA team to test all the test cases thoroughly.
- Use the benefit from continuous integration and continuous deployment. It allows your team to quickly obtain a build with the most recent additions or fixes. The technique of continuous integration testing automatically starts when any change is made to the codebase. Continuous deployment pushes changes to a staging or production system and simultaneously activates the integration testing. These two practices taken together quicken the delivery.
- Introduce security into software quality with a separate team early on. Embed security-related test cases as part of the shift left testing strategy. Security testing is about loopholes and vulnerabilities, hence, different from performance testing.
- Document all observations and notes. It removes ambiguity and makes for detailed reports that can be referred for making training material, configuration documents, and manuals.
- Let end-user feedback drive continuous improvements in your QA strategy. Solved problems and information from end-users when gathered properly can optimise your QA system and software delivery. It provides context to issues and can improve productivity by simulating the user’s perspective during testing.
- Practice mindful human intervention. Test automation should be complemented with human skills and intuition. In terms of user interface and user experience, a number of uncontrollable factors necessitate human skills should be part of an effective QA strategy.
- Embrace test automation with care. Automation is all about increased efficiencies, therefore, take into account factors like test maintenance, required execution timing, and avoidance of waste processes.
All these measures are a way of keeping the brand reputation and the customer view of software quality at the forefront. All QA activities are geared towards ensuring the highest possible quality of your software product or service and great user experience for your customers.
Automated Testing in QA
Testing at every stage of the application or software or program development process is an integral part of operation today and here, test automation is key to success. The right automation strategy and tools can save a lot of resources.
However, sometimes finding unique end-user bugs is difficult with automation, via predefined test cases. QA professionals provide that human touch to identify and solve tricky bugs. On the other hand, developers and testers need to pour in their motivation towards creating new features, and delivering higher-quality software. Using automated testing wherever they can, they get back valuable time for these pursuits.
Scripting a good enterprise-level automation that can be scaled is all it requires. In fact, a lot of highly repeatable tests with determinant outcomes can be safely automated. This will contribute to getting your product to market on time and under budget.
What Every Beginner Should Know About Testing Approach
The best quality assurance testing practices should improve the overall quality of the software while aiming continuous monitoring. There are multiple quality management tricks, finding the right one is the key. Any QA team should ensure that they meet all the requirements and the developed software product is of higher quality.
Calidad InfoTech can help you to draft a test strategy, and manage the quality standard. We perform continuous testing and quality control measures to ensure that the product expectations are met from the end-user’s perspective. We understand that the idea is to find the right combination of QA strategies that fit into your process, so that your product is in full compliance with the business objectives.
Software Quality Assurance Testing has become a highly critical practice to determine the goodness of a developed software as a whole.
Without the right testing procedures in place, unearthing bugs in the software can prove to be very difficult and time-consuming.You will be surprised to hear that most of the software glitches can be eradicated right in the preliminary stages only, by identifying their issues early on.
Among these early testing methods, smoke testing is one of the best methods for the early identification of bugs strategically.Read on to find out all that’s to know about Smoke Testing further on.What is Smoke Testing in Software Quality Assurance?Smoke testing in software quality assurance is a type of software testing where it assists in verifying if the software builds that has been deployed displays stability or not.
It’s a step before the actual software testing and provides the QA team with a good enough idea about whether to proceed ahead with further testing procedures or not.After a smoke test verifies the software build, it is then considered ready for further development and testing.
A good software build consists of data files, libraries, various engineering components, along with the different modules.To consider all these functions, we take a look at some of the important features of Smoke Testing.Smoke Testing- FeaturesThere are a plethora of unique features that make Smoke Testing different from other kinds of testing.
Mentioned below are some of the features of Smoke Testing-- Smoke Testing is also known as Build Verification Testing, where a build is verified through proper feature testing and then sent ahead for further testing based on observations.- Smoke Tests are flexible and can be both- automated as well as manual, depending on the requirements of testing.- Smoke Tests apply to all kinds of testing phases, like system testing, integration testing, acceptance testing, and more.The number of test cases in Smoke Testing is very limited.The Utility of Smoke TestingSoftware testing and quality assurance services employ smoke testing whenever there’s a need for new functionalities in an existing software build that’s been deployed in a QA ecosystem.
To ensure that only the best is made available for users, every software undergoes several tests to make it as seamless in its first profile as possible.Thanks to the increased use of Agile methodology in Quality Assurance, different tools are coming up to further streamline the software testing procedures.
While there is no way to ensure 100% automated testing, the right tool can help in maximizing the degree of automation to a large extent.
Categories of QA Testing ToolsQA testing tools consist of the following categories-Automation TestingAutomation testing tools refer to those tools that are responsible for setting up objectives and then analyzing the outcome based on what was expected in the first place.
Similarly, Agile testing also runs the testing process in similar steps, where the testing simultaneously happens with the development of features.Functional TestingAs far as functional testing tools go, they are responsible for identifying issues just before a product is released in the market.
Have a look at some of them-1- SeleniumSelenium is a top-notch tool that streamlines various web browsers to automate the created web apps for the purpose of testing.
It is a focal point through which multiple ecosystems can be managed without too much trouble.
This article highlights the list of crucial metrics to measure software quality and the benefits of using the parameters to improve it.
Software quality is of utmost importance, and many teams find it challenging to find the correct parameters to measure quality.
A QA strategy builds on the right QA metrics is effective and helps to release great software.
The areas where the team needs to focus more.
Unreliable test casesThis metric checks unreliable, a flaky test that fails to provide any useful feedback; instead, it consumes more time and resources.
The metric helps in analyzing poorly written test cases, human errors, intermittently fail or pass test cases.
