Significance of Quality Assurance in Software Development

Quality assurance plays an essential role in any production process and software development is not an exception. Despite that some small startups and software development companies may consider quality assurance a sideline activity and often downplay its significance, a multitude of real life examples prove that an ad hoc approach to quality control is not acceptable. The lack of seasoned quality assurance practice will result in failure to meet clients’ expectations, end user exasperation about the flaws and ultimately negative publicity for your business.

Mature QA during software development lifecycle (SDLC) ensures high quality end product, which is later on translated into end users’ contentment, high monetization rates and stakeholders’ ROI. This fact proves that quality assurance should not be neglected.

Quality assurance: is it all about testing?

There is quite a common fallacy that quality assurance is all about testing. While testing process is a part of quality assurance practice, QA is not limited to various types of tests and overlaps with other SDLC milestones. 

QA process involves both verification and validation and starts at the early stages of SDLC. Preparation procedures begin at the inception stage and include QA team staffing for an actual project, test plan compilation, where test goals, scope, approach and test deliverables are defined, and requirement testing. Verification is achieved through requirements, specification, design, code and test plan evaluation, performed during walkthrough meetings and software inspection. Verification plays an important role in quality assurance as it allows a software development company to prevent bugs at the early stages of SDLC and avoid subsequent bug fixing resulted form inconsistencies in software development documentation. This means cost-effectiveness for the whole software development project.

Software testing activities as a part of QA practice

Once verification is completed, QA team proceeds to actual testing, which involves various test activities:

• Functional testing, which is quality assurance of functional features of software components;
• Non-functional testing (load, performance, stress, security, localization, usability etc.), which allows QA engineers to spot performance, security vulnerabilities and other flaws, connected with non-functional requirements.

Once software bugs, revealed by QA engineers, are fixed, code and software components are again subject to validation process called regression testing, which ensures that all the patches in code haven’t led to other flaws in a software product.

The whole concept of QA in software development means conformity with such standards as functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability and portability. Eventually, adherence to quality assurance guidelines and fostering QA mindset translates into sound payoffs – high quality software and happy clients.