Meaning of QA Strategy

During the developmental stage of building your software, one always looks at what the final quality of the product will be. A set of actions is decided based on guidelines or rules decided byyou or a team. Members belonging to the Quality Assurance (QA) department must follow these rules to ensure the highest level of quality is maintained in the finished product. This set of actions is known as a software QA strategy.

Why an Effective QA Strategy is Important?

An effective QA strategy is essential for a number of reasons. Firstly, as a brand, you need to ensure that there is an internal standard of quality that is met. Your new product or software should be consistent with the standards already established in the name of your brand. This also means you make sure that the range of tools, tests, roles and expectations are also constant with each new project.

Secondly, a successful QA strategy helps you map out the course of your software development. You can plan out schedules, allot resources and make estimates of what kind of effort each stage of development would require. Through this, you can prevent expensive reworks in the software that are caused by delivering defects in the client release. Dissatisfied clients can harm your reputation as a brand.

Finally, an effective QA strategy secures the fact that your users have an excellent user experience. When research was conducted, it was said that almost 70 percent of users stop using apps and uninstall them due to poor user experience and buggy app performance. This not only harms the name of your brand, it also makes users lose confidence in you and your company.

Now that we have learnt the importance of QA strategies, we need to ensure that the software testing is optimized for your particular project. This means recognising the what, when and how of the required steps to deliver a high quality product in the end.

When speaking about the role of software testing tools, different tools and methods can serve different roles at various stages of the testing process. Either you use individual or a combination of testing strategies as per the requirement of your project.

For example, if you want to run a test without running the product being developed, the static testing strategy is used. This method helps you recognise and fix bugs and issues in the code itself. Such testing strategies are applied in the early stages of development. This step is very simportant as you can make sure problems caused by errors in code are dealt with before deploying your project.

Structural testing (whitebox testing) is the natural next step in testing your software. The role of this test is to fix bugs and issues in the pre production stage of your software. Usually, these tests are automated and function on already established framework based digital environments.Adequate space, the right conditions, automatic documentation, testing sequences and many other factors of the project are taken into consideration when designing the framework for structural testing. Automation of this testing only helps speed up the process while remaining effective. Complete access to software’s data flow and structure is required to track and make changes and compare the latest test to previous iterations of the test.

Finally, after you have ensured your code is flawless and that the mechanisms behind the scenes work well, you use behavioural testing (blackbox testing). This approach looks at your software from the user’s perspective. The QA team has information on what the software is supposed to function as and carries out manual activities to verify if said activities are carried out without bugs or hiccups. They will run these usability tests based on the purpose of the software and react to the bugs and issues like a user would. This helps in narrowing down theapproach of fixing these issues from a user experience point of view.

The job of software testing is one of eliminating all problems in various stages of the development of the product. These tests must be thorough,optimised and secure the high quality standards established by you or the organisation, resulting in delivering a flawless product.