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Software projects face many challenges from their inception to development and release. In fact, around 15% of software products fail shortly after delivery due to glitches. This costs the global IT industry and businesses billions of dollars each year.
The bigger indictment for the IT industry is that most of these inadequacies and faults are detectable and fixable before launch. That is why software testing and quality assurance (QA) usually consume about 25% of the entire budget of a software project.
With such a significant investment made in top-notch QA services, getting high-quality software is vital for gaining a return on that investment.
In this article, we will discuss QA techniques and tools that you can use to ensure that you obtain software products that meet the highest quality standards for your needs.
What are Quality Assurance Services?
QA services are systematic activities that ensure that a software product meets the specific quality standards. They ensure that the software functions as intended and provides a good user experience.
These services incorporate several practices and tools to confirm that final product aligns with the users’ and business requirements.
Some of those approaches include a range of testing and verification to detect defects and improve performance.
Optimizing Software Quality Through QA Services
To ensure high-quality software with QA services, one has to implement a structured approach to improve performance and functionality, prevent defects, and ensure that the software meets the user expectations.
Here is the guide for achieving high-quality software by utilizing the various QA techniques and tools:
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Define Clear Quality Standards
Outline well-defined quality standards around your project. It would help if you clearly knew how you want the software’s functionality, usability, and performance to behave.
Quality assurance services use different models to evaluate software quality. We recommend that you use the international standard for assessing software quality—the ISO 25010.
This model defines product quality in a structured way to ensure that the software product meets a high-quality standard.
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Implement Automation Testing
Automation helps save time by automatically running repetitive tests. This allows for quicker feedback and reduces reliance on manual testing.
Automated testing tools are better suited for certain types of software testing, such as load testing and performance testing, which require running iterations of the same tasks.
Choose the right automated tools for QA based on your requirements.
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Leverage Manual Testing
The increasing use of automated testing doesn’t mean that manual testing has no importance. Industry speculations have been going around for some time now that manual testing will become obsolete, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
However, that isn’t the case since manual testers are still required for specific purposes. Manual testing tools are used for exploratory and usability testing.
They ensure human oversight to uncover bugs that automated tests might miss.
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Regression Testing
After some recent changes, regression tests examine software to ensure that the modifications have integrated well into the existing framework. These changes can be new features, bug fixes, or updates.
Regression tests ensure that such changes have not caused any negative effects on the functionality of an application.
Performing these tests are critical if your software product has regular updates.
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Conduct Performance Testing
Performance testing is vital for high-quality software. Such programs are expected to have optimal performance under heavy user traffic.
There are some of the performance tests employed by QA services:
- Load testing
- Stress testing
- Scalability testing
- Endurance testing
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Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Continuous integration and continuous delivery are DevOps practices that streamline the software development process. Integrating QA into CI/CD pipelines allows you to leverage automatically triggered tests with each code change.
This allows for faster feedback and early error detection, reducing the risk of defects becoming more costly after production.
These are some of the CI/CD tools to streamline testing and QA:
- Jenkins
- GitLab CI/CD
- CircleCI
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Adopt Shift-Left and Shift-Right Testing
Shift-left testing is deployed early in the development phase to detect defects sooner. You can use QA practices like test-driven development, which creates the tests before the actual code is written.
Meanwhile, shift-right testing conducts tests in a production environment to monitor real-world usage scenarios. It helps gather insights from actual users and identify issues that may only appear under live conditions.
Canary testing is a popular shift-right test where a new software feature is evaluated by real users in a live environment.
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Analyze Test Metrics and Profiling
QA services collect continuous feedback from users and testers to improve the testing process. It would help if you used that to regularly review and analyze test metrics to adjust quality standards to better meet user needs.
These are some of the key test indicators that you should monitor:
- Mean time to detect (MTTD)
- Test pass rate
- Defect density
- Mean time to resolve (MTTR)
Conclusion
QA services incorporate a broad range of testing tools and techniques to ensure high-quality, reliable software products that meet user expectations and industry standards. By adopting these approaches to testing, you can enable your software project to meet quality goals effectively.
