Understanding the Real Impact of Quality Assurance in Modern Applications

The quality of any application is guaranteed by its constant monitoring for errors and bugs. Globally, this can be called quality assurance. It is all about using various techniques to check whether digital products meet the expected standards. 

In this article, we will be understanding modern quality assurance, consider the main ways of its implementation and give some real-life examples. 

Whether it is rigorous testing of products or their detailed inspection, we will see how ensuring the quality of our applications helps to maintain smooth operation in our daily lives.

Understanding Modern Quality Assurance: What makes quality assurance important?

• QA guarantees customer satisfaction.
• Brand’s reputation becomes more robust due to consistent quality.
• The losses for refunds and product replacement are reduced.
• QA allows raising a price tag higher than the competitor’s.

Phases of Quality Assurance

Outsourced QA services companies ensure that the internal testing team or individual testers follow the predetermined steps and evaluate them at specific points. PDCA cycle or Deming cycle forms a process of QA, which comprises the following phases:

• A plan is necessary for understanding how specific processes serve to establish goals and whether such procedures are necessary
• The Do phase determines testing of established processes and changing established work patterns if they fail to reach objectives.
• Check involves modification of the process as well as analysis of the necessary impact of the changes and their ability to meet objectives.
• An act comprises consistent actions leading to long-term positive changes.

Quality Assurance Testing Methodologies

Various types of QA testing might help ensure that the app has no bugs. Among the most common methodologies QA projects use for the improvement of the application, website or software:

Non-functional testing

1. Vulnerability/security testing finds weak points and security problems that hackers could exploit. Software QA services ensure that users’ data or other available information cannot be compromised.
2. Compatibility testing indicates the compatibility of the software and hardware it will be applied to. Hardware, a web browser, an operating system, and complementary plugins must pass the test.
3. Usability testing aims to make a user-friendly and intuitive app with an interface and design, which are easy to comprehend. 
4. Performance testing shows the variety of scenarios in which the app can be used and cause challenges for the user. The performance test determines the limits of the app and how it should work within these limits.

Functional testing

1. Unit testing implies dividing an app into units of source code and testing them separately. The focus on isolated parts of the app may require a lot of time and attention.
2. Integration testing is the opposite of unit testing. Its goal is to observe how the units work together and fulfil their functions as a whole. Software QA services involve the automation of the integration process to raise efficiency. 
3. System testing takes integration testing to a higher level, analyzing the entire system’s work as a whole. System testing points out the significant issues, which QA services company might have left unnoticed when testing details.
4. Acceptance testing supposes typically the use of the end-user testers ensuring the app fulfills the necessary functions. This phase comprises testing against the app’s specification.

Best QA Practices

Planning all necessary activities, creating an appropriate methodology and acting according to it might require time and resources. Implementation of the most effective QA practices helps achieve the high standards. Among the best practices a software testing company may apply are:

• Two-tier approach to test automation, which implies triggering the first tier in case of a commit to the code base. Fast validation of developer changes and their execution occurs in a few minutes. Meanwhile, it applies comprehensive regression testing by the second tier when no changes occur. 
• A dedicated security testing team working on detecting security issues normally performs penetration testing for the upcoming updates and releases.
• Dedicated performance testing team helps determine the new versions’ potential performance risks on a stable product version. Quality assurance companies can suggest and run performance tests for new features. 

International Quality Assurance standards

The certifications may serve as an indicator of a software vendor meeting the client’s requirements and quality level. The most reliable credentials for the customer to ensure that a software company follows the standards are:

• ISO 9001
• CMMI 
• Test Maturity Model (TMM)

QA approach should be designed to cover every aspect of the testing software. It needs to decide on some quality standards and a suitable methodology for every software to ensure constant profit increase and impeccable service.

Quality Assurance vs Quality Control

This is a common mistake. People often confuse quality assurance with quality control. Even though the concepts are similar, there are some significant differences between the two.

Quality assurance comes with guidelines that can be used anywhere where quality control promotes a more production-focused approach. Moreover, quality assurance is a systematic process for making sure that the products meets the requirements.

But quality control takes care of the other issues, like individual defects and inspections. In software development, quality assurance checks for preventing malfunctioning products or codes, and quality control troubleshoots and tests the codes.

Understanding Modern Quality Assurance in Different Industries

Here are some examples of how quality assurance is conducted in different industries.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry made quality assurance disciplined. Manufacturers ensure that the final product is devoid of defects and meets certain requirements and specifications.

Food Production

The food production industry uses X-ray systems. They use various techniques other than X-rays to detect any kind of physical contamination in the food production process. 

This systems make sure that it removes all the contamination before the product leaves the factory.

Pharmaceutical

Understanding modern quality assurance is important in the healthcare sector. The healthcare sectors need it the most. Pharmaceutical and healthcare companies use various quality assurance approaches in their drug development stage.  

The quality assurance processes include approving equipment calibration, reviewing documents, looking through the manufacturing and training records and investigating market returns.