QA professionals are not the enemy of developers. The success of most software development projects invariably relates to many factors, including how different functionaries relate to the project goal and their performance. In that respect, the relation between Quality Assurance (QA) team with the developers should be viewed with special importance. The relationship between app developers and the QA team can seriously impact the development process and the outcome.
Often there is a flawed perception that the job of the QA professionals is to find problems with the output of the developers and flag issues after the software is developed. This perception is flawed because the QA professionals help to improve the software quality and to create better scopes for marketability. This is why, instead of seeing the QA team as an adversary, leading developers always find it to be complementary to their job.
Whether it is the large scale enterprise mobile app development company or software company, for every development company across the niches, QA is the key to maintaining the highest qualitative output. Here through the length of this blog post, we are going to explain how QA professionals add value to a software development project and how they work hand in hand to ensure success for app projects.
Decoding the Real Problem
The general perception that quality assurance professionals only raise issues with the work of the developers and thus delay the project is simply derogatory to the huge role they play in a software development project.
The term “Quality Assurance” simply means ensuring certainty about the intended performance of the software product. Naturally, the work of the QA team is to validate the output of the developers. The QA team is there to ensure that the product built by the developers is of high quality. So, if the quality is the primary responsibility of the developers, QA team professionals are there only to help them achieve it.
How the QA Process Works?
To do away with the misconception about the role of the QA process and its relationship with the development team of a software development company, it is important to understand how the QA team works. Well, a QA team works basically through four steps, respectively, like planning, implementation, validation, and addressing faults.
Planning is about creating a detailed process to fulfill the objectives of the development process to ensure optimum quality.
Implementation is about the processes of the development and testing of software products.
- The validation or checking process corresponds to monitoring the quality output of the product after implementation.
- Addressing issues is required at last to improve the whole process.
Test Frequently and Quickly
Now that mist software development projects are increasingly turning to agile development, frequent and faster testing has become more integral to the development. Testing faster and testing often became part of most software projects that want to reap the advantages of the agile development process.
This approach has a lot of advantages to software projects in terms of quality. The faster the bugs or coding errors are found, the sooner they can be addressed to ensure the release of a quality software product into the market without delay. Moreover, since bug detection at a later stage only increases development cost, faster testing cycles can help reduce the development cost as well.
Fail Quick and Fail Often
QA testers in the agile development process assume every piece of code to be prone to errors. This optimum code coverage by the testing team leaves no scope for coding errors in the final output. Only by analyzing how a piece of code fails to do what it is meant for, the coding mistakes can be addressed and mitigated more elaborately. This is why the ‘fail quick and fail often’ has become an integral QA approach in the agile development process.
As more code needs to be covered because of deeper and expansive code coverage by the QA team professionals, repeated testing and faster fault-finding mechanism is required. When the volume of code continuously increases, it becomes almost imperative to use test automation tools to maintain optimum speed and efficiency while not missing any portion of the code.
Increased Volume of Tests in Agile
The agile development methodology is more about testing to find more faults and flaws in software products while addressing the errors through an iterative process. To facilitate such a robust testing mechanism, every piece of code is taken individually for validation and monitoring. Instead of combining all the codes for separate functions, the code pieces are instantly and quickly tested to ensure flawless performance.
Testing mechanisms are at work at different junctures of the agile process. Unit tests are carried out following every build. Apart from that, a series of tests, including integration tests, acceptance tests, functional tests, stress tests, component tests, etc. are carried out at different points. All these tests, through automation testing tools, are carried out often to ensure the comprehensive performance of all code parts within the software product.
Conclusion
Finally, for the vast majority of software products these days, the QA testers have to ensure that no technical glitches are left behind, the software code doesn’t break resulting in crashes in certain situations, and the business logic is kept intact and performing throughout the software product. To ensure all of this, they are required to conduct a greater number of tests with increased frequency. No wonder, with such grave role they play for software projects, they are likely to be the closest alley of developers, not their adversaries.
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