QASource Blog

Software quality assurance testing creates customers. Its value lies hidden within the smooth flow of your UI, the ease with which a problem turns into a solution and the reliability and security that customers come to take for granted. Software quality assurance is how you turn development innovation into customer experience execution.

Partnership is the combination of skills and experience toward a common goal. It is the shared belief in and responsibility for a product. It is a trust that if you do your best and I do mine, we can create something unique and worthwhile. When you engage a QA partner to share the responsibility of your software project, you get to experience all those warm sentiments of cooperation and trust. But you also get to strengthen your own development engine with the skills and experience of expert testers.

Preparation turns big problems into little ones, and it turns bug problems into little sprints. When viewed from afar—as a single, monolithic step in your overall software development process—testing an entire application can seem overwhelming. How do you properly account for every potential execution, for every combination of platform, purpose and user? Or for every practical real-world contingency?

Your product generates emotions. Each time your end user engages with your product, they have an emotional response based on how well it solves their problem and how difficult it is to achieve that solution. Usability testing is the process of making life easier for your users. When done correctly, it replicates the user experience accurately enough to expose any potential frustrations and to map the most intuitive way to get from the problem to the solution.

Time is the one resource you cannot replenish or write-off. It is unstoppable and unforgiving. It is also a crucial element in the successful delivery of any software development project. Outsourcing your software quality management makes time an ally. An experienced QA expert can find efficiencies at every stage of the testing process, from initial planning through to delivery. They can scale up capacity quickly, identify where and when to apply automation, unlock the advantages of Agile development and early bug detection and create a 24-hour cycle of continuous testing and product improvement.

Are you doing all you can to make your software stand out? Every day of every year, 6,140 new software apps are released on Google Play for Android alone, according to Statista. Switch to the Apple app store, and you will find a further 1,434 added daily. And that is just the mobile market. Those are the raw numbers behind the clichés we hear about “ever-increasing competition” and “rapidly evolving markets.”

As developers, you are not judged solely on your end product. Every step along the way to delivery is monitored and measured against software quality control standards. All your engineering processes, methods, activities and work items are subject to scrutiny. In today’s environment, you can get it wrong even though you, ultimately, got it right. In the realm of quality assurance, the expectations are that we understand both the need for and the burden of meeting such high software quality control standards. We also know that the way you design your software quality control plan is critical to your professional success.

Free often comes at a cost. In terms of open-source test management tools, that cost is the quality limitation placed on your QA. Even the savings you seek by choosing a free test management source disappear if a critical bug is missed, your launch date is delayed or you are forced to make expensive fixes later in production. While the well-established open-source test management tools have survived a decade or more in the software testing industry, their role has been greatly reduced. The simple irony is, it is hard to achieve maximum QA value with a free product.

Enjoying the advantages of offshore QA solutions should not mean you have to compromise your software development best practices. QA is a critical component of your SDLC, but it is not the only component that is important to integrate with your current development cycle. Similarly, while your QA team may be able to guide and optimize your testing requirements, they are not the sole stakeholders in your product’s success. Within this collaborative effort, your test management system aligns QA with other departments of SDLC. So, do not feel the need to give up your test management software of choice in order to access offshore QA testing and its attendant time, cost and quality efficiencies.