Every other person in the world has a smartphone and uses mobile apps. Hence, businesses are looking to capitalize on that. And if you are like most businesses, you are also developing a mobile app or software solution.
One of the elements you will focus heavily on is its quality. Now imagine what happens if you miss this crucial factor that determines the success of your apps.
How would it be?
It would be like creating a motorcar without ever testing it on the road, looking for safety issues, or assessing its performance. The result would be a highly faulty and unsafe machine with mediocre performance.
That’s why quality assurance is the core of every software development process. In simple words, it is a well-structured approach that ensures your software products or systems meet the specified requirements and deliver reliability and efficiency.
Now that you have a glimpse of how important quality assurance is, let’s try to understand the same in detail.
What is Quality Assurance (QA)?
As customer satisfaction and the delivery of top-notch products are beyond crucial for the success of any business, having the right systems and processes to ensure quality is also supreme.
Most businesses ensure quality via a systematic process called Quality Assurance. One must understand that QA is a critical component of software development and not a choice. A company that values customer satisfaction and wants to offer an excellent product must always use QA to ensure the app’s quality.
All QA processes must be a well-oiled machine to improve the development process, ensure adherence to specifications, and deliver products.
Quality Control V/S Quality Assurance
When it comes to quality assurance and quality control, they are not much different. What makes them different is how they achieve their goals. QA is concerned with the processes and procedures, while QC focuses on the results of these assessments and strategies.
When is the best time for QA in your project?
The best time to implement QA is when you start your app development project. In clearer terms, QA must be a part of the larger software development lifecycle to ensure that the quality is always met as expected from the project.
Every step must be scrutinized and evaluated via diverse quality assurance systems as the project progresses. This is essential to ensure the project always conforms to the established quality benchmarks.
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What Are the Objectives of Quality Assurance?
Quality assurance is a part of every software development process. It has diverse goals to serve that are functional and economical.
Let's understand each of these reasons here:
Improve user experience
User satisfaction is crucial in the digital landscape, and QA helps ensure top-notch user experience for all. Quality assurance strives to create seamless user experiences on apps where users can easily navigate and enjoy flawless functionality. With better user experience comes better user royalty and more revenue.
Find and fix bugs quickly
Quality assurance looks to find and discover bugs that compromise the functionalities and performance of the software. Bugs not only threaten the app's performance but also create security vulnerabilities. QA helps businesses ensure that the product is top-notch and free from defects.
Fortify reliability and stability
Businesses rely on QA to create a software ecosystem that ensures reliability and stability for its users. Through meticulous testing and performance analysis, Quality assurance looks to improve the software and make it more robust. As a result, the app can withstand heavy usage and constant user requests while delivering seamless user experiences.
Helps continuous improvement
Quality assurance is not a fixed goal for a software business. QA aims to keep improving the software and its offerings for the benefit of the users. This continuous improvement helps companies have their product in the market while constantly improving it with each QA revision.
What Are the Benefits of Quality Assurance?
The benefits of having an excellent quality assurance process are many. QA can decide if an app will be successful or not. Quality assurance has numerous benefits, and we discuss the most important ones here.
Let’s dive in.
Better resource utilization
A thorough quality assurance process helps businesses optimally use resources and reduce waste. When you discover errors and fix them, you can reduce the time and effort required to fix the same issue if you find out these issues only after the completion of the project.
App UX improvement
As an experienced quality assurance company, we know that quality assurance improves the user experience of apps. UX compromises are identified and quickly fixed when apps are checked during development. As it becomes an iterative process, the app becomes extremely user-friendly when launched.
Ensure enhanced security
When you have a detailed quality assurance process, you can understand the security vulnerabilities of the app right from the beginning. This helps you rectify these security problems and make the app more secure before it is completed. Better security makes users more confident in your app and brand.
Faster app development
Every business wants to reduce its app’s time to market. As an expert software testing services company, we know that quality assurance has a huge role. With continuous and prompt quality checks, the development process becomes quicker and time to market is drastically reduced.
Ensure cost-effectiveness
A strong and clearly defined quality assurance procedure helps businesses reduce the financial burden of developing an app. When an app is developed, it must be tested for performance, reliability, and security before it is live. It would be expensive for a business to check the app for quality after launching it. Hence, having an early system for quality checks is financially more important.
QA and Software Testing: Types and Methods
A quality assurance company may use diverse software testing methods to ensure the app meets its client's expectations. Some of the most common types of software testing used in quality assurance are:
- Unit testing
- Integration testing
- System testing
- Load testing
- Stress testing
- Functional testing
- Regression testing
Although each of these testing methods has a distinct goal to achieve, they all cater to the greater purpose of ensuring that the app is robust, reliable, and high performing.
Testing Methods
When it comes to quality assurance testing, there are two methods:
Manual testing
As the name indicates, tests are deployed and conducted by manual QA professionals. They do not use any tools to perform the testing.
Automated testing
In automated testing, the testing process is automated with the help of various tools, scripts, and programs which perform the testing tasks. As a software testing services company, AddWeb Solution uses both these techniques as necessary for the project. Some projects and testing scenarios need a manual approach, while others favour automated testing.
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What Is the Role of QA in Software Development Company?
In any software development process, QA has a huge role to play. Along with ensuring the app's quality, security, and performance, QA helps the business expedite its development process and reduce the app's time to market.
Without a defined process to ensure that the app conforms to the quality expectations of the client and the industry benchmarks, the app will never reach its actual potential.
Using quality assurance processes throughout the process, a quality assurance company can elevate any mediocre app to one that is top-notch, reliable, and secure.
Conclusion
Quality assurance is perhaps the most essential aspect of software development. Without checking and ensuring the app's quality, no business must deliver an app for its users due to various concerns ranging from security, bugs, performance, and user experience. Quality assurance is essential to make the app conform to established performance and security standards in the market. If your app fails to meet these benchmarks, no one will buy the app from you. Therefore, whether you are a large business or small, you must have a clear and detailed quality assurance process.
However, not all businesses may have the capacity to hire QA engineers dedicated to helping them. In such situations, you can hire software testers and QA consulting professionals from experienced and expert businesses offering quality assurance services like AddWeb Solution.
We have worked in the software development industry for over a decade and enjoy more than two centuries of combined experience. As a software testing services company, we have delivered customized and high-quality service to clients from diverse parts of the world in different business sectors. And if you want to work with a quality assurance company with a proven track record, we are your best choice.