Articles

The Importance of QA Testing for Software Development

by Malcom Ridgers Marketing Coordinator

If you were to survey the most frequent concerns in software development, you’d surely find that security is among the top answers. That’s hardly a surprise. According to Accenture, the last 5 years saw a 67% increase in security breaches, therefore it’s understandable that business owners and developers are trying to find a solution to mitigate risks.


One of the ways people have found to battle this high insecurity level is to incorporate QA testing as an essential part of the development cycle. Thus, companies are hiring software QA testers and even veering towards QA outsourcing to ensure that their projects end up being as free from vulnerabilities as possible.


Let’s see why this has become a trend that has huge importance in today’s world.


What is QA testing


QA stands for quality assurance, which basically is the activity that ensures a developer is providing the best software possible to its users. The idea of quality assurance (or QA testing, as it is more widely known) is to examine the processes that intervene in the creation of a software to guarantee they are efficient and effective according to certain quality standards.


QA testing employs a 4-step cycle called the Deming cycle or PDCA. It includes the following steps:


  • Plan: the stage where the team defines the processes needed to get to a high-quality product and determines its objectives

  • Do: here is when the development and testing of processes takes place. Also, it’s where processes are changed.

  • Check: the step to monitor the processes to determine if they meet the objectives defined in the plan.

  • Act: the implementation of changes to improve the processes.


This is known as a cycle because it’s not a one-direction, one-time procedure. A good QA testing goes through the 4 stages various times. The goal is to guarantee that the software is being designed and developed with the right procedures. This reduces issues in the final product.


It’s highly important not to confuse QA testing with quality control. The first works on processes during the development, while the latter is all about the quality of the end product.


Why you need QA testing


As we said above, a good QA testing implementation makes sure the software is developed with a process that limits the number of coding errors. By doing that, it ensures that the software is more robust and thus less prone to have exploitable vulnerabilities that can compromise sensitive data or the software’s own functionality.


The approach to QA testing leaves behind the idea of doing it as just another part of the development cycle. Today, QA software testing services work with methodologies like Agile and Lean in every stage of the development process. This provides a stricter control over the code and reduces the number of errors.


Additionally, there are other benefits that explain why you need QA testing services in your project:


  • Better quality code: the software development industry traditionally accepts that there’s an average of 15 to 50 errors for every 1,000 lines of code. That means there’s a high chance a software might end up being buggy if there’s no QA testing in place. And since poor quality software cost US companies more than $2.8 trillion, a buggy software is simply not acceptable.


Thanks to QA testing, you can bring that ratio down to a minimum. Counting with the help of a software QA company will give you access to a multidisciplinary team that will produce better code. That’s because they work with a group of specialists (from software engineers to security experts) on every step of the development cycle. In other words, there’s more control on each iteration, which frees the product from major errors and limits the number of minor bugs to a bare minimum.


  • Improved UI and UX design: thanks to new methodologies like Agile development, user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design is now integrated into every stage of the process. In that way, it’s intertwined with QA testing in every step through the multidisciplinary teams mentioned before.


In other words, design experts are included in every iteration to ensure that the way the software looks (UI) and behaves (UX) meets the requirements and the end-users’ expectations. Besides that, QA testing services companies also offer usability tests to give feedback on both UI and UX as seen by the end user's eyes.


  • Stronger protection: last year, 446.5 million records with sensitive data were exposed after breaches - and this number is expected to rise. As more companies venture into the Internet of Things and embrace cloud computing, the amount of sensitive data prone to be exposed is growing exponentially.


That’s why many businesses are hiring software testing outsourcing companies to do their QA. These companies use different methodologies (such as the Systems Security Engineering Capability Maturity Model) to make sure the development process is secure enough. In other words, they analyze the whole procedure to identify the base processes that have been met, the maturity levels that have been achieved and the security engineering processes they might need to add.


Final conclusions


Given the level of insecurity in today’s digital world and the looming threat of more attacks through software vulnerabilities, QA testing has become an essential activity during software development. Through it, companies can reduce the number of bugs and errors on the end-product, improve the software’s usability and provide greater protection to the end users.


For that to happen, you need to work with a multidisciplinary team that understands the importance of embedding QA testing in every step of the development process. Seasoned experts and offshore software testing companies are already approaching quality assurance with this mindset, which benefits the development process, the developer team, and the end-user.


So, if you’re about to start a software development project and you’re worried about cybersecurity, then you definitely need to acknowledge the importance of QA testing in the development of an improved product.




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About Malcom Ridgers Junior   Marketing Coordinator

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Joined APSense since, June 3rd, 2019, From Campbell, United States.

Created on Jun 21st 2019 10:27. Viewed 5,669 times.

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