How businesses can achieve ultimate success with a QA culture

Competition forces businesses or technicians to come up with things (read innovations) that they would not do otherwise. In the rat race where businesses are delivering products or services at the drop of a hat, not everything is lapped up by the end customers. At the end of the day, it is quality that plays an all-important role in making an enterprise successful. This is due to the fact that customers of the day are choosy, smart, knowledgeable, and won’t settle for anything less.

In fact, they choose products that meet the highest standards of security, usability, functionality, and performance, among other parameters. However, there can be issues galore when it comes to ensuring the quality of a product or service. To begin with, each product should work seamlessly across devices, operating systems, browsers, frameworks, and networks. This is easier said than done as ensuring that would mean subjecting the product to a rigorous quality assurance exercise.

Why software quality assurance?

Today, good customer experience has become a differentiator for the success of a product or service in the market. This can only come about when end-customers evaluate and accept that product or service based on various quality parameters. However, meeting such quality parameters in the SDLC consistently would require the product to be tested across devices, operating environments, and networks.

In the event of such parameters not meeting the desired standards, the consequences can be immense, both for the customers and businesses. The presence of bugs in a finished product can mar the quality of service. For example, it can allow vulnerabilities to creep in and let hackers steal sensitive personal or business information. Today, when software applications carry sensitive financial and personal information, the presence of glitches can render them vulnerable.

Since the traditional waterfall model has proved to be ineffective in measuring up to the quality standards of today’s products, methodologies like Agile and DevOps have come into play. If earlier, QA testing services used to follow development and integration, today these have become concurrent with them. The focus is on executing QA software testing alongside development to save cost and time. To make DevOps successful, businesses need to develop a QA culture where everyone is an equal stakeholder.

How to enable a robust QA culture?

Building a robust culture of quality assurance in the organization is not easy as it requires establishing a seamless coordination between silo-based departments and processes. The best way to go about the same is discussed below.

Engaging everyone in the process: For start-ups and small businesses, meeting the quality standards with their products need greater involvement of all the stakeholders. In fact, everyone involved with software development (and testing) viz., developers, managers, business analysts, and testers should be a part of the QA process. Except for developers, people can evaluate the functionality of a product and give feedback. The same can then be worked upon by developers to fix glitches, thereby offering a positive experience to the users. This shall make the QA process more efficient and help deliver quality products & services.

Follow Agile methodology: The process shall lead to better communication and collaboration between departments. Also, test management can implement better test automation tools to identify and fix bugs quickly and effectively. The use of QA automation tools can eliminate running of repetitive test cases. Thus, the QA team can focus its time in executing exploratory testing.

How a QA culture can help?

An all-encompassing QA culture can help enterprises to achieve success. They can do so in the following ways.

Better customer experience: A glitch-free application is a result of executing quality assurance and testing thoroughly. The final validation of features and functionalities against expected outcomes allows the application to work seamlessly across environments and customers to enjoy the best experience.

Faster time to market: When quality assurance and testing takes place alongside development following the Agile and DevOps methodologies, glitches are identified and remedied fast in the SDLC. As the workflow gets streamlined, the delivery of the product becomes faster.

Better security: The rising incidences of cybercrime have brought into sharp focus the importance of strengthening the security features of software applications. This can only happen when total quality culture pervades across the organization with every stakeholder being aware of upholding the security protocols, regulations, and standards. This can help to reduce security vulnerabilities and prevent applications from being hacked.

Conclusion

The changing market dynamics and the advent of new technologies have brought the aspect of ‘quality’ into sharp focus. It has not remained the preserve of a single department but a shared responsibility of all concerned. If only a total quality culture prevails in an organization, achieving success can only be a matter of time.