QA In Development

Quality Assurance in Development

Quality assurance, or “QA,” is a systematic process performed by a dedicated internal team to ensure the code, design, and usability of software are meeting standards users need and expect. QA is a crucial aspect of software development as it provides an added layer of quality control which improves the functionality and user-friendliness of a software application by providing dynamic testing throughout the development process.

But given the sheer number and variety of automated testing tools, is there a place anymore for an actual, dedicated team to accomplish the same result?

It depends who you ask.

Some of the benefits of automated testing are simply that a set of scripts and automated protocols are simply better able to test software at the scale and cost that a large team just can’t match. This simplification of the testing process is appealing to many shops because it requires fewer staff to complete and can ultimately mean cost reductions passed on to clients. Win-win, right?

If you ask us, the answer is actually no, not really.

While we believe this important aspect of development can benefit from some automation, no tool can replicate what actual people are able to bring to the software development testing process. And unfortunately, in many cases, when companies rely exclusively on automated testing, it generally means it’s being done by the developers themselves to reduce staff. Testing the quality of your own code is, well, missing the point of quality control.

We have refined our approach to QA over many years to optimize development time and deliver a high quality product that users love. Thanks to a combination of automation paired with actual people to create an end-result that’s pretty dang solid.

Our QA Process

The nature of the QA team we’ve built ensures ultimate adaptability to adequately perform the functions needed, given the vast array of devices, changing technology, and end-users our software encounters on a daily basis. This flexibility allows us to ramp up quickly, work with any size or type of team and begin testing early in product development, or later as necessary.

This process involves end-user testing of the functionality of the application, ensuring interactions with all interfaces are logically presented to improve usability and purposefully attempting to “break” the application to uncover bugs, inaccuracies, edge cases, and other faults in the software in a way that full automation just can’t match. Manual exploratory testing is a crucial element to the software development process as testing software is more than just a series of repeated actions, as automated testing alone performs.

While automated testing augments much of what our team does, having a human element fully dedicated to software testing makes the automation that much more powerful and effective.

In the long run, this means we’re able to build a better software product, with defects uncovered early in the process, saving our clients valuable time and resources.