Software Quality Assurance, or SQA testing, is one of the most critical steps in the software development lifecycle. Once the software is developed, the Quality Assurance engineers run this phase to discover bugs and errors, etc. As a result, once the product is launched, the chances of it encountering problems are significantly reduced.
The software quality assurance process is a systematic process where the QA testers use a wide variety of testing tools and techniques. The testers start off by first preparing an action plan for the project. The plan is developed during the planning phase of the project with the consent of the software developers as well as the stakeholders. The plan includes all the evaluations to be performed during the testing phase.
Besides, it also suggests a way that could test whether the software meets the defined standards or not. The SQA action plan includes procedures that could report and track errors. These reports are also documented properly for using them in the future. After the team has completed the testing phase, the SQA team reviews the process description for compliance with organizational policy along with internal software standards and externally imposed standards.
Although there are several reasons why software quality assurance is essential, some of the most important ones are:
Product Quality
For customer satisfaction, the software product developed must be able to meet their requirements and expectations. Not only this but also it should be achieving the highest quality of standard too.
For this purpose, QA testers must run the software through various testing tools and be sure that it works as planned. The phase might include testing the functionality, graphics, and device compatibility.
It is done to make sure that the software product does not crash once launched in the market. Quality assurance testers try their best to cover as many testing scenarios as possible during this critical phase.
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Customer Satisfaction
QA testers often like to call the testing phase of the SDLC as the customer satisfaction phase. Since the stakeholder invests hugely in software products development, they expect their product to work flawlessly. It is why QA companies strive to pull about a spectacular product that wins users’ hearts by giving them a fantastic user experience. As a result, this helps development companies to build a strong position in the digital market. Moreover, it helps them establish a good base of trustworthy long term clients.
Saves time and money
Although the testing phase may consume a significant part of the software development lifecycle, it prevents the software from experiencing problems later once it is launched. It is a matter of extreme trouble once the software encounters issues after its launch.
Not only does it take double the time and money to fix it, but it also severely affects its software’s lifetime.
This is why the SQA phase is run before it is released to the market.
Changes
No matter how much the software developers try to meet the customer requirements, they will need to make changes in the software until the end.
Regardless of how small the difference is, it can severely impact the overall software. Consequently, the need for a QA tester arises here.
A software quality assurance engineer first understands the difference to be made and then tests it. After this, he allows the developers to execute the change.
The Quality Assurance tester runs each component of the software through automated testing tools to ensure that the change works well.
Feature creep
The software quality assurance phase helps prevent one of the disastrous factors that lead to project failure, feature creep. If developers plan to add a feature to the developed software, software tester intervenes to play their role.
The QA testers help bring about attention to possible issues that might arise with it, hindering the software’s performance.
These issues might include security or scalability issues that if dealt with time can prevent feature creep
Security
Before software is launched, the QA testers must ensure its complete security. This is because any leak in the security may make the software dangerous threats. Many software has undergone security breaches which include confidential user information being stolen. Therefore, running it through security checks shields it from various threats. Not only does the testing phase help the software achieve consumer trust but also saves it from malware infections and code injections. As a result, users also get to have a trustworthy product.
Conclusion
The quality assurance phase includes strategies for executing tests on the product according to the given schedule.
The process involves the checking and monitoring of all operations while modifying certain aspects. The QA testers strive to find the rightmost testing process so that the software could meet high-quality standards too.
Keeping in view the reasons as stated above, the significance of this phase becomes even more evident, reflecting its imperativeness.
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