How Quality Assurance can help you save money for your business

Quality assurance, in software development, is mostly about ensuring that the product is efficient. It’s not possible to ensure that the product will be entirely free from defects and errors but quality assurance specialists continuously check throughout the development period whether the product or service meets the generally accepted requirements. 

It’s essential to make sure that the app is enjoyable for all users. What’s more, good quality assurance can help you save money for your business. In this article you’ll find out how. 

What is quality assurance?

First of all, let’s determine what quality assurance is in general. This term is usually associated with software testing. Tests are carried out in order to eliminate errors. 

However, it is not only about testing. Quality assurance is about ensuring good overall quality of a product, i.e. its efficiency, appearance and ease of use. It doesn’t mean that QA engineers check the whole product at the end of the project. Tests are actually being conducted at every stage of the project. For example in Agile methodology, testing takes place in every sprint along with development. 

What do QA engineers do?

So what is exactly included in software testing? QA specialists, along with the whole development team:

• test the product at all phases of the software testing life cycle 
• identify inconsistencies and errors in the code of the product
• report errors and inadequacies to the development team
• constantly inform about the quality of the product
• check edge cases.

QA engineers also cooperate by checking each other's work, as it is always easier to see someone else's mistakes than your own. This is why development and testing tasks often overlap and that’s why it’s useful to have several specialists responsible for testing. 

Read the whole article explaining what quality assurance is and why it is important here. 

Saving money with quality assurance

Thanks to good quality assurance you can save time to be spent on fixing errors. The later QAs find a bug, the more expensive it is to fix it. This also results in preventing next errors from occurring.

But quality assurance isn’t just about fixing errors. There are many factors that can be improved by taking care of QA testing that affect the price and therefore save time and money.

Integrity, loyalty & reputation

Will customers buy and will they use your software product if there are bugs in it? Probably not. That’s why integrity, loyalty and reputation are among factors that can be improved along with great quality assurance. QAs run test cases to ensure the quality of the product and the result is not only a well working program. You build your brand with clients' satisfaction. You gain loyal users who will be happy to use and recommend the product. That’s the success of quality assurance. 

Testing allows quality assurance engineers to control the whole development process to detect bugs and weak points when they arrive, so they can fix it or report straight away. Why is it important? Because if you rush the development team too much and the product is launched before the bugs are identified, users will be discouraged. This is exactly what we want to avoid, and we can do it with proper quality assurance. Everyone wants to finish the project as soon as possible. But let’s not do this at any cost. 

Software testing life cycle 

Software testing life cycle (STLC) is nothing but a sequence of activities performed during the testing process to ensure the best possible software quality. It is not a process or activity separate from the others related to development. STLC consists of: unit tests, integration tests, system tests and acceptance tests. It happens together with all the stages of the development process, also called software development life cycle (SDLC).

STLC stages

Dividing QA testing into stages in software development it would consist:

• Requirement analysis — before the development (and testing) starts, the team has to study functional and non-functional project requirements. This is when QA engineers decide about the needs for automated and manual testing. 
• Test planning — makes it possible to plan the work and provide an estimate. The team analyzes the risks and creates a testing strategy (including tools and platforms needed they’ll use for testing).
• Test case design and development — this is when testers design, prioritize and develop test cases.
• Test environment setup — testers define environmental factors to execute test cases. These factors are for example servers, frameworks, software and hardware.
• Test execution — it’s basically about finally executing test cases. QA engineers identify, detect and fix the defects, or report them to the software development team. 
• Test cycle closure — testers check the results of completed testing and discuss them with the development team. If something went differently than it was planned in estimates, they analyze it and decide how to improve the process.

Quality control in software development and testing

Quality control is a term that often appears alongside quality assurance. However, it does not mean the same thing. In a nutshell, while QA focuses on preventing errors from occurring, quality control means eliminating defects and errors. 

Quality control is included in the whole quality assurance ideology and in the testing life cycle. To ensure the quality of a software product, the team executes quality control by running test cases and finding bugs, and also reporting or fixing them.

Summing up, QA testing is not only essential in every software development project, but properly done enables to save money and time and increase user experience in the best possible way. 

Early detection of errors and optimization of the testing process, which is possible thanks to QA, makes the app simply a better product that users are willing to download and recommend. Therefore, there is no need for the product to be fixed in some way and you don’t lose users. That's basically where the savings come from.