7 Tips to Achieve Strategic QA and Testing Operations

In this blog post, I’ll attempt to redeem the vital importance of these processes and provide seven tips to help you greatly improve your QA and testing operations.

Due to new digital adjustments, organizations face the need to deliver on the fast track while assembling new skills altogether. These tasks not only need to be achieved correctly but rapidly. As new technologies emerge, new ways of managing are also required.

How Important is QA and Testing in Software Development?

At this point in the evolution of software development, it’s clear that quality assurance and testing are important parts of any project. But just how important are they?

According to a 2018 report by the Consortium for IT Software Quality, “the cost of poor quality software in the US in 2018 [were] approximately $2.84 trillion.” Yes, that’s trillion with a “t”. And as businesses and consumers around the world continue to intensify the demand for increasingly complex software applications, the importance of guaranteeing quality will only continue to mount.

Executive IT Management Placing More Value on QA and Testing

The staggering costs of poor software quality and the explosive demand for fast and fail-free software applications have grabbed the attention of today’s business leaders. In fact, senior IT executives surveyed in the most recent 2019-20 World Quality Report, qualified all seven QA and testing objectives evaluated as important or very important (greater than 5 on a scale of 1 to 7).

Among these, the top three most important objectives for today’s IT leaders are: 1) Contribute to business growth and business outcomes, 2) Detect software defects before go-live, and 3) Ensure end-user satisfaction.

The Need for a More Strategic Approach to Software QA and Testing

Despite the increased importance of quality assurance and testing for IT and business outcomes alike, many development teams still tend to severely limit the scope of QA operations – even in the largest and most strategic application development projects.

This underestimation is due to some common misconceptions, including:

• QA and testing can only be used for bug detection
• Testing alone will automatically resolve all quality issues with the project
• Implementing automated testing eliminates the costs of testing

Now, let’s take a look at why these limiting ideas are incorrect and just how important having the QA strategy and testing operations are for all software development projects.

First of all, QA and testing processes are not meant to concentrate on bug hunting only. They’re much more powerful than that. The true goal of testing is to gather all different kinds of useful information about the product and then to provide this information to the right parties. This is especially important in Agile development environments, where information and communication are the main drivers of success.

With a more strategic approach, you can expect much more than simple bug identification.

A strategic quality assurance and testing framework should include:

• Feature Implementation: Your software testing efforts should provide the project manager and other stakeholders with information about feature readiness. This type of testing involves test engineers, who can provide objective judgment and evidence that any particular functionality was, in fact, implemented.
• Feature Correctness: Your testing operations should provide information about feature correctness in the form of a carefully created and professional report. Your project manager will be able to review this report and see what new sets of functionality are working correctly and can be released to production. They will also be able to ensure that existing functionality still performs correctly and that there are no risks for regressions.
• Software Quality Information: Your QA and testing should provide other types of important information about software quality, such as stability, reliability, performance, usability, and security.
• Defect Identification and Analysis: And, of course, software testing should also provide information about existing defects in the system and provide information about their root causes.
• Defect Prevention: Finally, if testing is properly incorporated into the quality assurance framework, it will help to prevent defects from appearing in the future – not 100%, of course, but you should see a significant decrease in the defect rate.

How to Achieve Strategic QA and Testing Operations: 7 Vital Tips

Although testing is a very powerful tool, it’s not a silver bullet and should be used in conjunction with other software development best practices to achieve the optimal results in terms of project speed and product quality.

Tip # 1: Include QA and Testing in the Requirements Analysis

The most expensive and hard to fix defects most often appear at this stage. And if you don’t catch these errors early on, they’ll lead to flaws in the design and defects in implementation. This can even mean that big chunks of functionality will need to be thrown away and reworked entirely.

The good news is that simply adding software QA and testing experts to your requirements analysis process will significantly reduce the amount and severity of such issues. This analysis stage can be implemented in several different ways, from a static document review with checklists to identify discrepancies to brainstorming sessions where developers and QAs are involved and working as a group.

Tip #2: Perform Thorough QA and Testing Planning

Many people think of test planning as an excessive and unnecessary process. Unfortunately, this means that countless software development project plans do not contain accurate information about testing schedules, resource needs, communication plans for test environment setup, etc. As a result, when it comes to start testing activities, it suddenly appears that the project budget is running out, there is not enough time, integration test environments are not ready, or any number of last-minute problems.

To avoid these problems, simply consult with your test engineers when putting together your project plan. This way, they can provide time and resource estimates and other vital input to ensure QA and testing are tightly aligned with all other project activities. You’d be surprised how many things can be done in parallel and not in rush at the very end when properly planned ahead of time!

Tip # 3: Review and Adapt Your QA Strategy for Each Project

Good QA and testing plans should always be based on a good QA strategy, meaning one that meets the unique needs of each specific project. Even if all your projects are within the same domain or within the same system, you should always review and adapt your testing QA strategy for each new project/feature. Even when projects seem to be the same, they often contain details that make them unique and, therefore, require different types and methods of testing.

Many teams concentrate on black-box functional testing on the UI level, even though other techniques will provide more effective results. For example, if your project requires integration with third-party services, it’s beneficial to introduce automated testing on an API level.

And if you’re implementing a publicly-available web application, you should think about how to add usability and compatibility testing on mobile devices. As these examples demonstrate, reviewing and adapting your QA strategy makes it clear far in advance what additional purchases or preparations will be required before the actual testing phase.

Tip #4: Follow Software Development Best Practices

Proper use of development best practices will significantly reduce defect rates, greatly increasing the quality and maintainability of the software system being built. Such best practices should include the introduction of code standards across all teams involved, group and peer code review, and development testing.

Tip #5: Implement Effective Communication Practices

Communication planning and communication culture will also have a major impact on software quality. Effective communication practices will help reduce the quantity of review and correction cycles between test engineers and developers, speeding up the overall development process. They will also help improve quality by providing more information and context to all parties involved.

Effective communication practices should include:

• Test Planning: It’s important for your test engineer to describe their plans for testing to the developer. Ensure they describe the types of testing that are planned and provide an overview of major test cases that will be executed.
• New Feature Implementation: Allow for communication between the responsible developer and test engineer each time a new feature is implemented. Ensure the developer describes the details of the implementation, including the algorithms, data flows, data structures involved, etc.
• Demo Meeting: Introduce a demo meeting between the developer and the test engineer as a required step before passing the newly implemented feature into testing.

Tip #6: Establish Proper Configuration and Release Management

Configuration management and release management are crucial parts of quality assurance. It won’t matter how good you were in the implementation and testing of your system in development and test environments if mistakes are made in configurations later on.

These mistakes could lead to deploying the wrong build to production, misconfigured production during deployment, an insufficient downtime window that causes data corruption…and so many more unfortunate situations.

Don’t let these mistakes derail the entire development project when you’re so close to the finish line! Establish proper configuration management processes early on, including developing a branching strategy, implementing CI/CD pipelines with automatic build, test, and deploy processes. And be sure to plan and communicate your releases to all appropriate

Tip #7: Take Advantage of Automated Testing

When implemented properly, test automation provides many significant benefits, such as:

• Faster feedback about overall application stability
• Faster identification of errors
• Improved confidence in application quality at every stage of development
• Decreased effort required for repeat testing (e.g. smoke or regression)
• Improved test accuracy due to eliminating the human factor
• Improved test coverage due to the ability to include tests that are too costly to be executed manually

Although automated testing offers these significant benefits, it’s important to remember that test automation does not eliminate test execution costs for those parts automated. Automated testing has its own maintenance costs, which include analysis of test runs as well as fixes and extensions of the automation test suite as the application evolves. This is the price of the benefits mentioned above. But if properly planned, the maintenance costs of an automated test suite can be less than the corresponding costs of manual execution.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, software quality assurance and testing are complex processes, intertwined with all aspects of development projects. Whether you’re building a simple application for internal use or a complex, customer-facing software system, implementing QA and testing in a strategic and well-structured way is vital to ensuring not just optimal product quality, but also to keeping your project on track and on budget.

One of the most effective ways to optimize your QA and testing operations is to engage an experienced IT outsourcing provider, with deep software QA and testing expertise, like TEAM International. Our nearshore talent and expert solutions can help you align your business goals with technical priorities, create engaging user experiences, and quickly deploy your software to market across multiple platforms and devices.

Contact us to take your QA and testing operations to the next level!