What is quality assurance?
Quality assurance (QA) ensures digital products or services meet set standards and customer expectations by preventing defects in the first place. It includes systematic monitoring, evaluation, and improvement measures and is conducted throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Even if quality assurance can be mistaken for quality control (QC), these procedures could not be more different. This is because quality control, being reactive in nature, focuses on identifying and fixing defects much later in the software development lifecycle.
QA Objectives & Benefits
Quality Assurance aims to maintain consistency, reliability and overall excellence by detecting errors in code and design so as to ensure that the software lives up to design standards. By taking a proactive and process-driven approach, QA drives quality by adhering to procedures and standards from the get-go.
Now, implementing quality assurance comes with benefits such as risk mitigation, consistent quality and customer satisfaction. Not only can the organization prevent product failures and complaints, but potential defects can be eliminated long before they reach production. If your organization has ambitious quality standards, QA processes can meet compliance on an ongoing basis. Most importantly, QA substantially reduces the cost associated with detecting defects late in the SDLC.
The Impact of Poor Product Quality
While every industry stands to gain by implementing QA processes, some industries need to take quality seriously, given the catastrophic effect that offering a poor product can have. For example, in the medical, automotive, food & beverage and the aerospace industry, lives can be lost. As for the manufacturing and software industry, this can result in a serious loss of revenue. Worse still, product recalls as well as frequent fixes of defects when the application is in production can cause costs to balloon.
Common QA Methodology, Tools & Roles
As for general approaches used in QA, there are several. However, three stand out in comparison to others: Total Quality Management (TQM), Failure Testing and Statistical Process Control (SPC). Other approaches that are worth mentioning include Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA), Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Six Sigma, Kaizen and Quality Circles.
Some of the generic quality tools used in QA include the Cause & Effect Diagram, Check Sheet, Pareto Chart, Scatter Plot, Histogram, Control Chart and Flowchart. For QA tools pertaining to software development, some of the popular ones include Selenium and Cypress for test automation, Playwright and Puppeteer for cross browser testing, Appium for mobile app testing, Postman for API testing and BrowserStack for software testing in general.
Lastly, the most common QA roles include:
- QA Testers or Engineers
- QA Managers or Leads
- Automation, DevOps or Performance Engineers
- UI/UX Testers
- Product Owners or Managers
- Customer Support
