How to Create a Successful Software Quality Assurance Plan for Your Business

Software quality assurance is an important part of software development.
Quality assurance ensures that the software is meeting the requirements that were set out by the stakeholders to ensure a successful product. Quality assurance engineers can identify user problems and errors through testing, commonly also recognized as “bugs”, which can ultimately lead to better customer experience and quality.

1. What is software quality assurance and why is it important?

Software quality assurance means assessing a piece of software to identify areas where it does not meet expectations or standards. The goal of testing is to find errors and different ways in which users are experiencing difficulties with the software. This can be done through automated processes or manual input from testers. Quality assurance helps developers improve their product by discovering flaws, so that they may make corrections before releasing it to the public.

2. Who should be involved in software quality assurance?

Software QA should be done by an independent person or team, outside of the development team, who will independently review and test the product. The process should be led by someone with an understanding of both software development and testing methods.

For instance, In Lasting Dynamics the quality assurance process is divided into 4 steps:
– code review & feature review
– automated tests execution (CICD)
– sanity and smoke testing
– regression testing

The code and feature review is always taken by developers, that before merging a code change, take care of the code quality, spot eventual issues and check the CI pipeline didn’t fail to execute the automated tests. When the code is merged, sanity and smoke tests are manually executed by QA engineers in a staging environment. When the change is good, another tool that uses AI comes into the process to execute all regression tests to make sure the whole software increase can be safely deployed in the production environment.

3. What are the best practices for software quality assurance in organizations?

Software quality assurance is the process of ensuring that quality requirements and standards are met but also the set of practices that avoid the introduction of regressions during each production release.
It ensures that software is reliable, usable, and meets the needs of customers by collecting information from them.
To do this, testers must follow certain best practices.
A basic schema would be:

1. Identify the needs of your customer

2. Perform testing as early as possible in the development cycle

3. Treat every bug as a potential issue and try to reproduce it in your own environment

4. Try to reduce bugs with your skills instead of letting them pile up

This kind of schema should be definitely followed by developers first and QA engineers later.

4. How to create an outstanding SaaS QA plan and test case management strategy?

The answer is simple: the strategy should follow the same process as any other product development plan.

The plan should be detailed and include a list of risks, mitigation, and documentation plans. The first step to developing a strategy is to have an idea of how the testing process will work and what it will entail.

Testing is crucial as it ensures that the software works properly and meets its quality standards. This requires a lot of planning beforehand because if you don’t test your product thoroughly, you risk releasing bugs that may harm your customer’s experience with your SaaS solution.

In 2021 it’s fairly important to let developers participate in the QA process, they should understand since the first day of work that “development” means a lot of things:

• destructuring of requirements in smaller sub-tasks in a workflow management system
• development of a task
• testing of the same task
• design and development of the minimum set of automated tests
• code review and feature review of teammates tasks

Securing these practices you are halfway far from the QA process end, which means all the other steps that include CICD, sanity and regression testing are the other 50% only altogether.

5. Tools for effective software QA: QA tools and testing tools comparison, Mantis, Selenium, Codeception, etc.

QA tools are an important part of the software development process because they help ensure that the software is free from errors and bugs, reducing human error.
As such, there are many tools on the market that can be used in QA testing, some of them are:

Mantis: Mantis is a free open source project management and bug tracking tool. It is a good solution for small teams or companies with limited resources.

Selenium: Selenium is a web-based automation framework to test the user interface of web applications by simulating user actions like clicking buttons, checking boxes, filling out forms, scrolling and more.

Testsigma: Testsigma provides automated testing solutions for various types of software including legacy systems, mobile apps and web apps by using Selenium IDE (Selenium Integrated Development Environment).

Conclusion

Software Quality Assurance is one of the most important phases when it comes to delivering successful projects. Setting up a structured workflow with manual and automated tests can make the difference and prevents your software get regressions or bugs in production. In Lasting Dynamics quality assurance engineers work every day to make all our projects a success, whatever the tech stack is. For example, did you read how to use React with Redux?
If you have questions, please let us know in the comments!