Software quality assurance should start as early in the software development life cycle as at the requirements gathering stage and comprise the following activities:
- Requirement analysis: The QA engineers start their work on the project while parallelly generating the requirements document. The aim is to analyze system architecture and technologies for discrepancies.
- Test Planning: test planning describes the actions QA engineers perform to make sure the piece of software functions as planned. Once the requirements have been established, test planning is the next step
- Test Design: Once the development is done, the QA team starts running the test cases. The main step here is to check whether the solution is developed properly from the technical perspective and meets the initial product owner’s requirements.
- Test execution and defect reporting: The QA engineers record bugs in a project management system as soon as they discover them. Reporting simplifies communication within the team and helps keep a clear overview of the improvement process.
- Release testing: When an issue that was earlier reported is fixed by the developer, he/she should inform the QA engineer to verify it. No bug can be marked fixed until verified.
Some of the benefits of QA are:
- QA saves you money
- QA inspires client confidence
- QA maintains a great user experience
- QA brings in more profit
- QA boosts customer satisfaction