More and more companies around the world recognize the importance of Quality Assurance in their IT projects. In North America alone, the market share for software testing increased by 45% in recent years due to the rising market trend of mobile applications and agile methodologies. According to a recent report from Global Market Insights, these require continuous upgrades and a reduction of time-to-market. Having a QA team involved in the digital transformation journey guarantees a much smoother ride, but why exactly do you need them and how can your digital solutions reach their full potential by having QA professionals embedded with your project from the start?
In this competitive world, time to market is crucial to put companies one step ahead of their competition. That’s why enterprises are investing in agile software methodologies. When ‘building software fast’, assuring the quality of the delivery can end up being a real challenge if not addressed correctly, compromising the final product and customer satisfaction.
Involving the QA team in the Agile process from the onset brings transparency and effectiveness to your delivery. When following this approach, the QA team is part of the team from the start, following all of the project stages and ultimately delivering a product that reaches its highest potential, bringing real value to the customer.
The focus is no longer just on delivering bug-free software or getting all the imperfections leftover by the developers. The core idea is to prevent bugs from occurring during the build phase and that can be assured by having a QA team directly involved in it. QA will work closely with the business analysts to define the acceptance criteria and share with the team, to plan and design the tests that need to be implemented. Following the principles of agile development, it is crucial to understand that everyone involved in the project must think about quality. After all, there is no value in delivery, if there is no quality in it, and it is just frustrating.
Let’s have a closer look at how you can benefit from adopting this approach.
Define the right test strategy.
Having a risk-based test strategy is essential to better adapt to the way agile methodologies work. Often we have limited QA resources in the teams but the project goals need to be accomplished on a sprint by sprint basis, which means that we do not have time to run all the tests planned to ensure that the features we developed in a given sprint are properly tested. Keeping in mind that the delivery date cannot be changed, and the quality cannot be compromised, it is crucial to carefully manage the tests’ plan ahead of each sprint to extract the most out of the investment.
Although the QA specialist may have a good idea of which tests have the highest priority, risk-based testing is a formal way of identifying where to put the effort, ensuring that all the key flows and functionalities that might impact the business are covered. QA has the skills to go through the user stories, business, and non-functional requirements, assess the risk and influence the plan to assign the right testing priorities to the different features. This can only be achieved by including QA right from the project start.
Plus, when the QA team works side by side with the developers they can directly influence them to deliver with better quality because they understand what the testing standards are and how the quality will be measured against.
Apply the best practices to ensure your functional and non-functional requirements have been fulfilled.
Having a Quality Assurance team as part of your projects is essential to ensuring that your product is aligned with all objectives. The logic behind this is simple: developers are focused on creating applications, and of course, they will verify that the systems they are building meet all the expected requirements. QA comes as a complement to functional and non-functional checks. They execute many different types of tests, such as functional, security, performance, usability, and accessibility, adding an extra layer of quality to the project.
The QA team can detect security flaws and other problems in its tests, preventing future problems for your business, such as the leakage of confidential information, system unavailability, and even unexpected error messages for the end-user. Software stability is also an area they dominate. To create a perfect multi-experience for end-users, it is essential to verify that all features really work correctly on different devices.
Save time and money for a fast ROI.
A common goal in a project is to save time and money. An experienced QA Team will surely save you time and money, as they can find risks and occasional bugs that are easier and less expensive to fix in an earlier stage, not compromising the project’s development. An error found on your project after the implementation phase will cost you a lot of time and money to fix and can make you lose a valuable amount of business, as your service might end up frustrating your users/customers.
But how much does it cost to fix a bug in the real world? Samsung Note 7 was already in production when a bug was found. According to a Synopsys blog post, experts believed that one of the problems with the mobile phone involved the battery management system. A fault in the system could lead to the battery overcharge with the possibility to become unstable or even explode. This bug fix cost Samsung almost $17 billion based on a Reuters calculation as it wasn’t found in an earlier stage of the software development life cycle.
Conclusion
We can’t deny that errors can have a considerable impact on your digital projects after implementation. To avoid unnecessary costs and the delay of ROI, you should always consider integrating a QA team on your project from the beginning.
Overall, QA makes digital transformation much smoother for businesses, by using different types of testing and automation before the final release and surely will make the developers better at their job. Flawless code is a myth, and if the tester works side by side with the developers they can directly influence them to deliver with better quality throughout the project.
To complement our offer, we have strengthened our Quality Assurance strategy at Truewind. We know that by having a QA team integrated within the projects’ team, we are adding higher quality and transparency to our customers’ projects and teams by giving on-going feedback and sharpening the digital platforms for the end-users. We also choose a test strategy based on risk analysis to prioritize what is most valuable to the customer in terms of business, project deadlines with the expected allocation and ultimately optimizing the QA team efforts. Excellence in projects is our main driver.
Published 22nd March 2021
