Today, when the development sphere has gone way beyond traditional software, most IT practitioners are aware of the value a quality assurance (QA) team can bring to their product.
Just a few years ago, this wasn’t the case, as far fewer companies engaged in quality assurance practices. It wasn’t uncommon for developers to ask, “Why is quality control important?”, or “Why do we need a QA team?” While these views are less commonly held today, quality assurance as a practice is still vastly undervalued in many organizations.
Leaders who define QA teams as the group that “just tests software” fail to realize the true goals and responsibility of quality assurance as a practice. In this article, we’ll explore why QA is important and matters for successful business outcomes.
From a budget standpoint, it might seem reasonable to ask your software developers to test their own code. Why bother about a dedicated QA team when you can cut costs and deliver the product to the market faster? There are some successful examples of teams that operate without quality assurance, like Facebook or Yahoo. However, such practice suits enterprises with highly evolved team cultures and require a significant amount of test automation.
By limiting testing activities or moving them lower on the list of your priorities, you might be missing out on ways to improve your application. Also, the bugs may not only mar the user experience, but severely compromise your product reputation and stability. The aforementioned tech giants are also not immune to these pitfalls. Below are a few well-known incidents caused by plain oversight of those responsible for quality control:
Below, we will explore the purpose of quality assurance and the main benefits of including QA in the product development process in detail.
As stated in Wikipedia’s quality assurance definition, it’s “a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services to customers.” There’s more to QA than this, after all.
Whether your application is B2B or B2C, user experience can make or break your product. In the case of enterprise software, companies go for solutions to solve their business inefficiencies and accelerate their processes. Slow, unproductive, and glitchy software will fail to bring the organization value. Quality assurance helps ensure that end users are satisfied, and the application closes all functionality gaps as is expected of it.
Having a high-quality product makes the process of building long-term and mutually beneficial business relationships much easier. This is especially true with B2B products. By prioritizing quality, you will help your customer generate value and eventually, greater profits. In the long run, the stability and sustainability of the services and products you offer will convert clients into returning customers.
Bugs will happen; they’re an inevitable part of the software development cycle. What you want to avoid is the chaos of discovering them too late in the development process. Late-stage functionality issues inevitably cause delays and hurried fixes, and clog developers’ schedules, eating away at the resources you’ve planned for other activities. Organized testing processes and having a clear test implementation strategy will allow you to allocate your resources more strategically and catch the bugs before they cost you more work hours than you have available.
Gradually and with time, a consistent quality assurance strategy, coupled with agile methodology best practices, will bear fruit and result in more time for exploratory testing and searching for improvement possibilities.
Investing in quality assurance is not only worthwhile, but indispensable, particularly given today’s fierce competition in IT. It is useful to know and use QA team best practices to achieve optimal results. So, let’s discuss how to create a good quality assurance team and run it effectively.
Since quality assurance engineers usually handle diverse tasks with different complexity levels, the best approach to compiling a team is not to look only for the best and brightest. A solid team is comprised of varying skill levels, not just all-stars. The team will benefit from members who are able to diligently handle routine, repetitive tasks. Those who are perfection-driven, people who tend to look deep into the root of an issue, team members with leadership qualities, techies, and even freshmen will make a good addition to the team, as long as they are open to learning new things.
Managers should work to discover everyone’s talents and consider an individual’s unique skill set when assigning roles within the QA team.
Like any team, a QA team is strong and successful when it’s well organized, features a healthy atmosphere, motivation, and a common goal. All of this is the result of solid management. Typically, a quality assurance team lead possesses superior technical skills and expertise, but not necessarily the knowledge of how to run a QA team. Aside from the general guidelines on team-building, here are some industry-specific recommendations that are worth considering and implementing:
The aforementioned recommendations can be successfully applied both to teams gathered “under one roof,” as well as remote and hybrid teams.
QA analysts usually hear questions like, “Does Google have a QA team?” The answer is yes! And so should you. Behind each successful and high-quality product, there’s a team of professionals who work on maintaining and improving its quality standard and serving as a sentry against bugs and defects to stop them from getting to users. A QA engineer questions the developers’ work on improving software by dealing with finding and fixing all kinds of flaws.
Editor’s note: The article was first published on March 14, 2020, and was updated for relevancy and accuracy on September 30, 2021.